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Kingdoms of Life
Aristotle lived around 1,400 years ago. Among
his many achievements was that the was the first to classify
life forms. The defining characteristic of animals was that
they moved. Plants did not. They were rooted.
Carl Linnaeus was a Swedish botanist,
physician, and zoologist, who laid the foundations for the
modern biological naming scheme of binomial nomenclature. He
is known as the father of modern taxonomy, and is also
considered one of the fathers of modern ecology. The first
edition of his
Systema Naturae
was published in 1735.
The
10th edition was published in two volumes in
1758 and 1759, which marks the starting point of zoological
nomenclature. In it, Linnaeus introduced binomial
nomenclature for animals, something he had already done for
plants in his 1753 publication of Species Plantarum.
Linnaeus' works divided all life into two kingdoms: plant
and animal.
German biologist Ernst Haeckle (see Haeckel's Invertebrates) used a
microscope to discover thousands of previously unknown
species. They were not animals, nor plants, so Haeckle
established the protisa kingdom in 1866. It was realized
that many other life forms were not true animals nor plants
and they formed the basis for the Fungus Kingdom The
four kingdoms - Animals, plants, protists and fungus are now
classified together as the Eurarya domain.
A domain is a classification form above kingdom. Two other domains
are now recognized: the archae and bacteria. There are
numerous ongoing controversies regarding many aspects of
life form classification. Some feel that the two domains
should actually be called kingdoms. What species should go
into some of the groups, and the relationship of the groups
to one another. England and Europe favor a five-kingdom
system. American scientists feel favor six kingdoms.
The primary purpose of Kingdoms of Life is to introduce the
various type of life forms under the American 6-kingdom
system. Each kingdom/domain is explained and representative
species are shown. There is a chart at the bottom of the
poster that shows how everything is classified under the
various classification systems. We'll leave it to the
experts to settle the disputes. We're simply presenting the
underlying information. |
