CAS BI 108 Chapter Notes - Chapter 26: Carl Linnaeus, Polytomy, Convergent Evolution
Document Summary
How biologists classify thousands of millions of species on this planet. Phylogeny is the evolutionary history of a species or group of species. It tells us how certain specie evolved in the first place, the common ancestor of certain species and how they have been modified in all these years. It is only with the help of phylogeny that the biologist can actually distinguish and grade these species. Systematics is the classification and the study of organisms with regard to their evolutionary relationship. Most of us in our everyday life use common names for organisms for example monkey, fish etc. but this creates confusion since most of these names refer to more than one species. To avoid this biologists refer to organisms by latin scientific names. The two- part format of the scientific name, commonly called a binomial, was introduced by. Take the example of panthera pardus, the scientific name for the large cat commonly called the leopard.
