Ranks and scientific names

Classification is arranged in ranks, from the biggest group to the smallest:

Kingdom → Phylum → Class → Order → Family → Genus → Species.

The further down you go, the more features the members share. Each group sits inside the one above, like an address: country, state, city, street, house.

Two full addresses:

Why scientific names? At home, a new baby gets many names: Nani calls him Tintu, an uncle calls him Pintu, someone else calls him Golu. When he joins school, he gets one fixed name everyone uses. Animals are the same. A tiger is *bagh in Hindi, puli in Tamil and tigre* in French. Golgappa, paani puri and paani ke patashe are all the same snack. To avoid confusion, Carolus Linnaeus (18th century) gave every species a two-part Latin name: binomial nomenclature.

The first word is the genus; the second is the species:

• Panthera tigris: tiger;
• Panthera leo: lion (both are in Panthera, the roaring cats);
• Mangifera indica: mango.

A species is a group of similar living things that can breed together and have young.

The rules for writing scientific names:

• The genus starts with a capital letter.
• The species is all small letters.
• Printed: in italics.
• Handwritten: underline each word separately.

Practise with your own name: write it as if it were a scientific name, with a capital for the first word, small letters for the second, and each word underlined.