When people started naming species, Latin was a language widely used in Europe. All species names are still written in Latin. This has some advantages. Since Latin is no longer spoken, it is unchanging, and is owned by no-one. It gets over the problem of every language having its own names for animals and plants.
Scientists used to write the official description of each new species in Latin. On 1 January 2012, the International Botanical Congress changed to allow English (as well as Latin) for describing new plant species. The International Code of Zoological Nomenclature recommends choosing a language that is widely used, and that is used in the places where the species lives.
An important modern approach to taxonomy is cladism. This approach is based on the branching (tree-like) course of evolution. Like traditional Linnaean classification, it uses traits to decide on the branches of the classification. It insists on groups being monophyletic. This has the effect that birds are not a class but a sub-group of dinosaurs. It also means the ranking system described above would be abolished.
So cladism has different principles of taxonomy, and produces a different kind of taxonomy. Decisions, where possible, are supported by DNA sequence analysis. Present-day biological classification is a mixture of the old Linnaean and the modern cladistic principles of taxonomy. In parts, it is changing rapidly. The classifications presented in Wikipedia at present are often a compromise between the two systems. The details are regularly discussed.
Today, there are many changes in the classification of living things. This turmoil in taxonomy has led to many alternative classifications. It is caused partly from the move from Linnaean to cladistic principles, and partly by the use of DNA sequence data in taxonomy. An example is: the way derived groups like birds should not be classified at the same level as the group they evolved from. Yet birds have traditionally been a class under the Linnaean system.
The turmoil sometimes results in differences between related pages. Pages may rely on different references and different authors' opinions as to the present best arrangement.
The following source is good on the differences between cladistic and taxonomic classification systems:
The Sun
The Sun is the star at the center of the Solar System.
The Sun may also mean:
Temple
A temple is a building where people go to practice their religion. In a temple people may perform religious rituals, ceremonies, and pray. Thus, a temple is a general term for a house of worship. Christians usually call their religious buildings churches.
Some examples of temples from different religions:
Theft
Theft is when one person or group takes from another persons or state any object, money, or information without permission. A person who has been convicted of theft may be called a thief. However, the practice of engaging in theft is also called stealing. There are many different types of theft, such as pickpocketing and shoplifting. Burglary and robbery are separate crimes which involve theft.
Stealing is basic and is illegal almost everywhere. Thieves steal things sometimes because they want to have something for themselves, or because they want to sell something for money. Sometimes thieves will make plans to rob a store, bank, house, or person, and sometimes they will just see a chance to steal something and take it. Some thieves have kleptomania.
When thieves steal things for money, they usually pick cars, electronics, laptops, or other things they can sell easily. Sometimes thieves use pawn shops to sell things easily to someone who will not ask questions.
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland or simply the United Kingdom (UK) is a sovereign country in Western Europe. It is a constitutional monarchy that is made up of four separate countries: England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. It is a member of the United Nations, the Commonwealth, NATO, the G8, and formerly the EU. It had the sixth largest economy in the world by nominal GDP in 2019.
Around 66 million people live in the UK (2018). They can be divided into four big nationalities based on the countries where they live (or where they were born or their ancestry).
About 95 per cent of the UK's population are English speakers. 5.5 per cent of the population speak languages brought to the UK as a result of relatively recent immigration.
The UK has many cities. London is the biggest city in the UK and is the nation's capital city. There are also other big cities in England including Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Bristol and Newcastle upon Tyne. Scotland has the big cities of Edinburgh and Glasgow. Cardiff and Swansea are in Wales and Derry and Belfast is in Northern Ireland.
Between the 17th and mid 20th-centuries, Britain was a world power. It became a colonial empire that controlled large areas of Africa, Asia, North America and Oceania. At its height in 1922, more than 458 million people lived in the British Empire, one-fifth of the Earth's population. Its area was 13,012,000 square miles: almost a quarter of the Earth's land area. The empire was sometimes called 'the empire on which the sun never sets', meaning the sun is always shining on at least one of its territories. Almost all countries left and became independent from the empire in the 20th century, although Britain keeps links with most countries of its former empire.
The "UK" is an abbreviation of United Kingdom, which derives from when its Kingdom had been United.
Species of humans have lived in Britain, for almost a million years. The occupation was not continuous, probably because the climate was too extreme at times for people to live there.
Archaeological remains show that the first group of modern people to live in the British Isles were hunter-gatherers after the last ice age ended. The date is not known: perhaps as early as 8000 but certainly by 5000. They built mesolithic wood and stone monuments. Stonehenge was built between 3000 and 1600. Celtic tribes arrived from mainland Europe. Britain was a changing collection of tribal areas, with no overall leader. Julius Caesar tried to invade (take over) the island in 55 but was not able to do so. The Romans successfully invaded in 43.
Written history began in Britain when writing was brought to Britain by the Romans. Rome ruled in Britain from 44 to 410. They ruled the southern two-thirds of Great Britain. The Romans never took over Ireland and never fully controlled Caledonia, the land north of the valleys of the River Forth and River Clyde. Their northern border varied from time to time, and was marked sometimes at Hadrian's Wall (in modern England), sometimes at the Antonine Wall (in modern Scotland).
After the Romans, waves of immigrants came to Britain. Some were German tribes: the Angles, Saxons and Jutes. Others were Celts, like the Scoti, who came to Great Britain from Ireland. English and Scots are Germanic languages. They developed from Old English, the language spoken by the Anglo-Saxons of Anglo-Saxon England, an area stretching from the River Forth to the River Tamar.
A later wave of immigration was that of the Vikings, during the Early Middle Ages' Viking Age. During the Viking invasion of Britain, they set up their own kingdom in north-western England, which the Anglo-Saxons named the "Danelaw", after the Danes who lived there and controlled the land. Vikings from Scandinavia also controlled most of the islands which are now part of Scotland, including the Outer Hebrides, the Inner Hebrides, and the Northern Isles (the Shetland Islands and the Orkney Islands).After a long period when Anglo-Saxon England was split into various kingdoms, it was made into one kingdom by Æthelstan (Athelstan) in 945. In the 13th century, the lands of Wales were unified by force with England by the wars of Edward I of England ("Edward Longshanks").