A gardener friend of ours used to object to calling a plant by its Latin name. She heard it as pretense and obfuscation. But after the sage incident, she conceded that there was some point to it.

Carl Linnaeus's use of erotic language to describe plants ultimately helped him to recruit a global network of specimen collectors. In August 1749, Pehr Kalm, a medical student from Finland, travelled ...

To mark the 300th anniversary of Carl Linnaeus’ birth, The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens are mounting a small exhibition of rare books drawn from its own remarkable ...

Last summer on a warm Paris morning, a few dozen members of the International Society for Phylogenetic Nomenclature gathered at the National Museum of Natural History. The occasion was a talk by Jason ...

The Age of Exploration brought Europeans riches, a broader view of the world, and a hell of a lot of new plants and animals to describe. That was heaven for Carl Linnaeus, a young Swedish doctor with ...

Each flash card is printed on the recto side only and has a small engraved illustration (some are lightly hand-colored) with two numbered questions The booklet, which has 38 pages, contains answers to ...

A new naming structure proposed by an American researcher moves beyond the Linnaeus system to one based on the genetic sequence of each individual organism. This creates a more robust, precise, and ...

A band of renegade biologists is taking on a mammoth task that threatens to upset a status quo that has been unchallenged for almost 250 years. Put simply, they want to change the way scientists name ...

The relevance of taxonomy in our genomic era is greater than ever. Correct naming is crucial for developing new foods and medicines, and for understanding our changing environment. Amazingly, we do ...