Wednesday 5 December 2012

A note on the taxonomy post!

I just realised when revising plant biology that I forgot to mention that the typical taxon name endings I descrbed in the post on taxonomy rules only apply to animals!! Plant (and probably other organisms) have different conventions for ending names of orders, families, subfamilies, etc. This is because Linnaeus, who engineered the basics of the texonomic system, initially classified all life as either plants or animals (he also tried to classify minerals in a hierachical system...), so he probably intended the different norms of nomenclature to make distinction clearer.

In plants, the order tends to end with -ales and families with -aceae. There may be more conventions, but these are the ones I am aware of.

I apologise and hope my unclearness has not caused any inconvenience!

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