Flashcards: Biological classification

In zoological nomenclature, a type species (species typica) is the species name with which the name of a genus or subgenus is considered to be permanently taxonomically associated, i.

In biological taxonomy, race is an informal rank in the taxonomic hierarchy, below the level of subspecies.

In biology, a taxon (plural taxa; back-formation from taxonomy) is a group of one or more populations of an organism or organisms seen by taxonomists to form a unit.

Cladistics (from Greek κλάδος, klados, i.e., "branch") is an approach to biological classification in which organisms are categorized based on shared derived characteristics that can be traced to a group's most recent common ancestor and are not present in more distant ancestors.

In common cladistic usage, a monophyletic group is a taxon (group of organisms) which forms a clade, meaning that it consists of an ancestral species and all its descendants.

The International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN) is an organization dedicated to "achieving stability and sense in the scientific naming of animals".

A polyphyletic (Greek for "of many races") group is characterized by one or more homoplasies: phenotypes which have converged or reverted so as to appear to be the same but which have not been inherited from common ancestors.

Zootaxa is a peer-reviewed scientific mega journal for animal taxonomists.

Biological systematics is the study of the diversification of living forms, both past and present, and the relationships among living things through time.

Binomial nomenclature (also called binominal nomenclature or binary nomenclature) is a formal system of naming species of living things by giving each a name composed of two parts, both of which use Latin grammatical forms, although they can be based on words from other languages.

The International Code of Nomenclature for Cultivated Plants (ICNCP), also known as the Cultivated Plant Code, is a guide to the rules and regulations for naming cultigens, plants whose origin or selection is primarily due to intentional human activity.

The Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) is a free, online collaborative encyclopedia intended to document all of the 1.

The Eocyte hypothesis is a biological classification that indicates eukaryotes emerged within the prokaryotic Crenarchaeota (formerly known as eocytes), a phylum within the archaea.

ARKive is a global initiative with the mission of "promoting the conservation of the world's threatened species, through the power of wildlife imagery", which it does by locating and gathering films, photographs and audio recordings of the world's species into a centralised digital archive.