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.
About 300 years ago, Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus set out on a bold quest: to identify and name every living organism on Earth. Now celebrated as the father of modern taxonomy, he developed the binomial naming system ...
Plants & Animals
Dec 23, 2025
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Researchers at the University of Kansas Biodiversity Institute and Natural History Museum recently uncovered a slipup from decades ago: the misidentification of a poison frog specimen from Peru used as a holotype. A holotype ...
Plants & Animals
Dec 15, 2025
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Between the 16th and 19th centuries, when colonialism was the prevailing order, it is not surprising that scientific expeditions, specimen deposits in natural history museums, and descriptions of species from European colonies ...
Plants & Animals
Dec 10, 2025
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An international team of researchers has discovered three new, bizarre, and wart-covered species of tree toads from Tanzania that give birth to fully developed toadlets. A key element of the study was the examination of specimens ...
Plants & Animals
Nov 6, 2025
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Recent advances in long-read sequencing techniques have produced large amounts of high-quality rRNA marker gene data about eukaryotic organisms, but many of these taxa have remained unknown at the highest taxonomic levels: ...
Molecular & Computational biology
Oct 20, 2025
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Scientists from the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, as part of an international research team, have studied the land snail and slug fauna in northern Vietnam's Cuc Phuong National Park. The now-published findings document an ...
Plants & Animals
Sep 30, 2025
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Meet Heinrichiellus natgeo, a newly discovered species of parasitoid wasp. The species was described by Dr. Ranjith and Dr. Gavin R. Broad (The Natural History Museum, London, UK). Genetic data helped them determine the new ...
Plants & Animals
Sep 16, 2025
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Herbaria, or "museums for plants," house millions of samples collected over centuries. Stanford biologist Barnabas Daru shares how modern technology can unlock this treasure trove, providing scientists with vital insights ...
Plants & Animals
Aug 28, 2025
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Oak gall wasps and their predators don't have the panache of butterflies, but they're attracting growing interest among both scientists and naturalists.
Plants & Animals
Aug 19, 2025
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The 66th Supplement to the American Ornithological Society's (AOS) Check-list of North American Birds, published in Ornithology, includes several significant updates to the classification of bird species found in North America, ...
Plants & Animals
Aug 15, 2025
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