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In his landmark publications, such as the Systema Naturae, Carl Linnaeus used a ranking scale limited to kingdom, class, order, genus, species, and one rank below species. Today, the nomenclature is regulated by the nomenclature codes. There are seven main taxonomic ranks: kingdom, phylum or division, class, order, family, genus, and species.
Genus (/ ˈ dʒ iː n ə s /; pl.: genera / ˈ dʒ ɛ n ər ə /) is a taxonomic rank above species and below family as used in the biological classification of living and fossil organisms as well as viruses. [1] In binomial nomenclature, the genus name forms the first part of the binomial species name for each species within the genus.
While there is no commonly used database, there are comprehensive databases such as the Catalogue of Life, which attempts to list every documented species. [101] The catalogue listed 1.64 million species for all kingdoms as of April 2016, claiming coverage of more than three-quarters of the estimated species known to modern science. [102]
The abbreviation for species is sp. (plural spp.) and is used after a generic epithet to indicate a species of that genus. Often used to denote a strain of a genus for which the species is not known either because has the organism has not been described yet as a species or insufficient tests were conducted to identify it.
The genus Homo has been taken to originate some two million years ago, since the discovery of stone tools in Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, in the 1960s. Homo habilis (Leakey et al., 1964) would be the first "human" species (member of genus Homo) by definition, its type specimen being the OH 7 fossils.
Accordingly, Linnaeus's classification treats animal as a class including many genera (subordinated to the animal "kingdom" via intermediary classes such as "orders"), and treats homo as the genus of a species Homo sapiens, with sapiens (Latin for "knowing" or "understanding") playing a differentiating role analogous to that played, in the ...
The basic unit of classification is species, a group able to breed amongst themselves and bearing mutual resemblance, a broader classification is the genus. Several genera make up a family, and several families an order. [1]
Some biologists have argued for the combination of the genus name and specific epithet into a single unambiguous name, or for the use of uninomials (as used in nomenclature of ranks above species). [22] [23] Because genus names are unique only within a nomenclature code, it is possible for homonyms (two or more species sharing the same genus ...