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 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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22
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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32
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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123
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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237
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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64
Toddlers can name a few animals. Older kids group animals into categories (birds, fish). And teenagers can sketch a rough tree of life. But when 16 grown-up biologists—five of them affiliated with the Smithsonian Tropical ...
Plants & Animals
Aug 4, 2025
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154
To most anglers, a "sucker" is the last fish they want to see on the end of their line. But to the scientists who study these bottom-dwelling fish for their research, knowing exactly which species of sucker they've netted ...
Ecology
Jul 28, 2025
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55
There are thousands of species of birds, and many of their names are well-known to us—blue jay, robin, and mallard, to name just a few. But we have little understanding of the holistic nature of avian nomenclature.
Plants & Animals
Jun 11, 2025
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