Human

You might already be familiar with this unusual organism— it's a human being! More specifically, it's everybody's favourite 18th century Swedish biologist, Carolus Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy (often called "Linnaean taxonomy.") Like lots of scientists back then, he wrote in Latin, and "Carolus Linnaeus" is a Latin version of the name he was born with, Carl von Linné. Taxonomy is just classifying things, and the Five Kingdoms of Life model taught in schools in the UK (and used on this site) is the direct descendant of his classification system. He also came up with the idea of using two-part, or "binomial," Latin names like Homo sapiens to make sure biologists know exactly which organism they're talking about. This makes things a lot easier considering how vague common names can be— the bird called a "Robin" in the UK and Europe, for example, bears no relation to the one native to the US apart from its name. Calling it "Erithacus rubecula" instead lets anyone know you're talking about the European bird.

Carolus Linnaeus

Linnaeus loved to categorise things, so he decided to try to organise everything in the world into groups. He was a botanist, so he started with flowers and moved on from there. This was about a hundred years before Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution in The Origin of Species, so Linnaeus didn't know anything about common ancestors or natural selection. He was just grouping things together based on their shapes, starting with three Kingdoms: Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral. Each Kingdom was divided into groups called Phyla, which contained more groups, and so on. Nobody really uses his non-living "Mineral Kingdom" anymore, but biologists everywhere still group living things into groups, or "taxa," based on his system. The taxa you'll usually see used are Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, and Species. That's a pretty long list to remember in order, so a sentence like "King Phillip Came Over For Great Soup," can come in handy. Just take a look at the first letters of each word!

To get an idea of how Linnaen Taxonomy works, let's see where we humans fit in. We're animals, which makes us members of Kingdom Animalia. Our backbone puts us firmly in Phylum Chordata, the group within Kingdom Animalia which includes everything with a spinal column. We're warm-blooded, have hair and we sweat, which makes us mammals, of Class Mammalia. Along with lemurs, monkeys, and apes, we're part of the Order Primates. Linnaeus actually came up with this group himself, putting monkeys and humans together for the first time because of our five fingered hands, basic body shape, and our similar teeth. Our closest relatives in the Primate Order are chimps, gorillas, and orangutans, so modern biologists place us with them in Family Hominidae, the hominids. The only species in our genus, Homo, has been us, Homo sapiens, since the last Neanderthal (Homo neanderthalensis) died around 30,000 years ago.