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209 The Taxonomy and Systematics of the Dinosaurs Thomas R. Holtz Jr. and M. K. Brett-Surman Taxonomy, the naming of names, is the scientific practice and study of labeling and ordering like groups of organisms. It should not be confused with systematics, the scientific study of the diversity of organisms within and among clades (genetically related groups of organisms). Both help us to understand the world of organisms, but each practice helps us in a different way: systematics, to understand relationships among organisms, and taxonomy, to give internationally standardized names to organisms and groups of organisms in order to increase the efficiency of communication among researchers. All languages have common names for different plants and animals. The main problem is that all languages have different names for the same plants and animals. This was not a problem until natural historians started to catalog and study the floras and faunas from around the world. It was realized by Western Europeans that the animals and plants of India, eastern Asia, the Pacific Islands, and particularly the New World of North and South America had great economic value as sources of medicine, spices, food, and furs. Whoever was the first to find and identify new plants and animals of economic importance in these regions would have the best access to these resources. Thus it became important to identify and classify these organisms. There was initially a great deal of confusion as the great exploring and colonizing European countries each used their own names for the plants and animals they were discussing in the scientific literature. The only compromise that pleased all concerned was that every organism would be given a formal, official name based on Latin or Greek, the language of the most highly educated Europeans and of the Catholic Church. In the seventeenth century, Caspar Bauhin (1623) and John Ray (1686–1704) invented the precursors of the later binomial (two-name) system. They introduced the concept of genus and species. It was not until the eighteenth century that these names were organized into a hierarchy of divisions (kingdom, class, order, family, genus, species) by Carl Linné (formally known as Carolus Linnaeus), a natural historian and botanist in mid-1700s Sweden, and his successors (Linné 1758). The basic principle of the Linnaean taxonomy is the nested hierarchy, in which each group is nested in a series of larger and larger, and thus more inclusive, groups. Each group is a taxon (plural taxa), a named group of organisms. Living taxa are recognized by their unique combinations of anatomical characteristics–bones, skin, hair/feathers/scales, physiology, DNA sequences, reproductive features, and so on. Extinct vertebrate taxa can be defined only by their bones and teeth. What’s in a Name? Taxonomy 1 1 Holtz and Brett-Surman 210 Taxa are named in Latin or Latinized forms of other languages. Among other languages, Greek is the most common in taxonomy, but any other language (including English, Mongolian, Sanskrit, and the invented languages of J. R. R. Tolkien) will do, as long as it has Latinized endings. All taxa, of whatever level, must be in Latinized form. Taxonomic names can be named after anything the discoverer decides, commonly including the following:·  Features of the anatomy: Mammalia, for the mammary glands.· General appearance: Anatotitan, “titanic duck,” for a duckbilled dinosaur.·  Behavior (alleged or otherwise): Tyrannosaurus rex, the “king tyrant lizard.”·  Name of their discoverer or other significant individual: Lambeosaurus, discovered by L. Lambe.·  The location from which it was found: Albertaceratops, a horned dinosaur first discovered in Alberta, Canada. The most basic taxonomic levels, to which every living organism can be assigned, are the genus (plural genera) and species. The rules of nomenclature (the official naming of taxa) are based on species. Species names are listed only along with the genus name, never by themselves. Species are, literally, more specific words than genera: species refer to a smaller total number of organisms than do genera. The international rules for naming a new species are governed by the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature. The exact biological or philosophical boundary where one species ends and another begins (or, more practically, whether a given specimen is assignable to a particular species) is the subject of much debate among biologists and paleontologists. Different criteria are used to define species by different scientists. Some, for example, use the degree of similarity or difference in the genetic code of a newly found organism in comparison with a cataloged species. Others define the boundary...

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