Systematics and taxonomy are complementary scientific disciplines within the biological sciences that address organismal diversity and evolutionary relationships. Systematics encompasses the study and inference of phylogenetic relationships using morphological, molecular, behavioral, and biochemical data, often employing cladistic, probabilistic, or distance-based methods to reconstruct evolutionary histories and test hypotheses of common ancestry. Taxonomy provides the principles and rules for discovering, describing, naming, and classifying organisms, including species delimitation, typification, and hierarchical ranking under formal codes of nomenclature. Together, systematics and taxonomy generate a predictive classification framework that reflects phylogeny and underpins comparative biology, biodiversity assessment, and conservation planning.
An international research team, including the Leibniz Institute for the Analysis of Biodiversity Change (LIB), has described a new species of spider from the Ecuadorian Amazon: Taczanowskia waska. The species is characterized ...
Plants & Animals
Apr 7, 2026
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247
Identifying weeds, checking out the pollen map, or discovering new plant life-forms are among the promising wealth of data available to users of PlantNet—a "Shazam!" for plants. Pierre Bonnet and computer scientist Alexis ...
Biotechnology
Mar 31, 2026
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43
The half leaf-fingered geckos (Hemiphyllodactylus) are a diverse group with more than 70 recognized species and a distribution range from southern India and Sri Lanka, through Indochina and Southeast Asia, to the western ...
Plants & Animals
Mar 31, 2026
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9
Museum collections have underpinned scientific research for centuries. But physical specimens in boxes and drawers don't easily lend themselves to the research techniques of the new millennium. "How can we apply these techniques ...
Plants & Animals
Mar 27, 2026
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26
The Galapagos Islands are famous for the discoveries that shaped Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. Now an SFSU graduate has added one more: Ezra Mendales (M.S., '23) describes a new species as part of his master's thesis. ...
Evolution
Mar 26, 2026
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113
Researchers from the Earlham Institute, in collaboration with the Department of Biology at the University of Oxford, have discovered three previously unrecognized lineages of the protist Bodo, each with its own bacterial ...
Cell & Microbiology
Mar 23, 2026
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7
Dr. Amy Baird, Professor of Biology at the University of Houston-Downtown (UHD), and her colleagues are seeking to change the attitude of biologists toward the meaning of taxonomic categories above the species level with ...
Plants & Animals
Mar 18, 2026
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11
The cactus on your windowsill may grow slowly, but new research shows that cacti are surprisingly fast at creating new species. Biologists have long thought that pollinators and specialized flowers drive the formation of ...
Plants & Animals
Mar 17, 2026
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39
The genus Gracixalus belongs to the family of Old World Tree Frogs and is geographically dispersed from Myanmar and western Thailand to Laos, Vietnam, and further to southern China. Despite the considerable amount of research ...
Plants & Animals
Mar 10, 2026
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48
A thin band of light from Cristian Lucanas's headlamp pierces the blackness of a Philippine rainforest as he digs through the underbrush before gently scooping up a cockroach with his bare hands.
Plants & Animals
Mar 8, 2026
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