Indeed, how did life, including humans, evolve? At the centre of questions like these is the scientific practice of identifying and naming species, or taxonomy.

Although often overlooked or ignored, species' Latinised scientific name can hold the key to whole new, and often entertaining, perspective on the natural world.

Why Some Scientists Want to Stop Naming Organisms After People An international team of researchers wants to stop using eponyms. But the naming authorities won’t budge.

Move over, Linnaeus: There's a new way of naming organisms. Known as the PhyloCode, this system defines scientific names based on evolutionary relationships.

The practice of playfully naming new species after celebrities, friends and enemies is as old as the practice of binomial nomenclature, the scientific naming of organisms.

When using the scientific name, you can converse with anyone, anywhere in the world and be confident that you’re talking about the exact same plant. That’s the power of scientific names.

Taxonomy is the science of describing, classifying and naming organisms. It organizes the vast diversity of life on Earth. Species are grouped based on shared characteristics, providing a system ...

A bottlenose dolphin? Or Tursiops truncatus? Why biologists give organisms those strange, unpronounceable names Story by Nicholas Green, Kennesaw State University • 1h ...

Without commonly accepted names there would be no way to communicate research about life and it is the profession of taxonomists to put names on organisms and describe the different forms of life ...

Crikey steveirwini. These are the scientific names of just a few of the nearly 25,000 species of plants, animals, fungi and micro-organisms discovered and named in Australia in the past decade.

The Hitler Beetle and Other Oddities of Scientific Naming No rules stop researchers—or even anyone who wins an auction—from giving new species any moniker they like.