Classifacation
Classifacation is putting things into orderly groups based on similar characteristics. The classifacation of living things makes it easier for biologists to answer many important questions such as how many known species are there? What are the defining characteristics of each species? What are the relationships between these species? Before the 1600s many scientists divided organisms into two groups: plants and animals. In the 1700s Carolus Linnaeus, a Swedisah scientist, founded the modern taxonomy. Taxonomy is the science of describing, naming, and classifying.
Levels of classifacation.
Every living thing is classified into one of the three domains. Archaea, Bacteria, and Eukarya are the three domains. The eight levels of classifacation are domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species. A way to remember them are Did king Phillip come over for goos soup.
Dichotomous Keys
A Dichotomous key is an identification aid that uses sequential pairs of descriptive statements. Below is a dichotomous key see if you can identify all the fish.