The classification of organisms into groups, taxonomy, has taken a step forward thanks to work by researchers at the University of Queensland. Led by Professor Philip Hugenholtz, the team approached ...

The way in which most multicellular organisms have been classified has been the same for more than a century. Only recently have scientists developed the tools and knowledge to question the way we ...

Humans make stuff up—including the names and classifications of living things. But those categories are still useful. In this episode of Crash Course Botany, we’ll explore how taxonomy and systematics ...

Foraminifera (forams) are shelled microorganisms that are abundant in the Earth’s seabed. Analyzing different species of forams provides important information about climate change, the state of the ...

Biologists are confronting a problem they thought they had mostly solved: what, exactly, counts as life. A wave of discoveries at the edges of biology has produced organisms and quasi-organisms that ...

During a seminar at another institution several years ago, University of Chicago paleontologist David Jablonski fielded a hostile question: Why bother classifying organisms according to their physical ...

Cladistics is one way scientists classify organisms. A cladogram shows the nature of evolutionary relationships that may have occurred, similar to a family tree. You will make a cladogram in this ...

In the quest to decipher the evolutionary relationships of extinct organisms from fossils, researchers often face challenges in discerning key features from weathered fossils, or with prioritizing ...