User blog:StaraptorEmpoleon/Taxonomy for dummies, part 1



Stop and look around you, look at the different objects on your desk. Now, you want a way to organise them into different drawers, no? For example, pens go in one drawer while pencils go in another. Now you've organised them!

Well, scientists have a way of doing this, but with living things. It is called taxonomy, or the study of classifying living things. Taxonomy makes it easier for scientists to know the relationships between, let's say a tree and a cat.

For starters, here's an easy mnemonic that anyone can memorise.

Dumb Kids Prefer Candy Over Fancy Green Salad (Domain, Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species).

So, let's classify some birds. The birds are arranged in the table below. Did you know that all of these birds are actually related to each other? You will find this out in another blog post.

That is just a sampling of the 10,595 species of birds, 233 families and 45 orders.