There are millions of different types of living things on Earth. In order to keep track of them all, scientists put living things into groups based on characteristics that they have that are the same.

This article was originally featured on Undark. For centuries, taxonomists have cataloged every living thing they could find. Expeditions have traveled the globe, searching for unknown species; ...

Swedish botanist Carl (or Carolus) Linnaeus is, by some measures, the most influential person ever to have lived. He is famous for devising new systems for naming and grouping all living organisms, as ...

During a seminar at another institution several years ago, University of Chicago paleontologist David Jablonski fielded a hostile question: Why bother classifying organisms according to their physical ...