Boa constrictor snake eating a human12/2/2023 Appropriately for his line of work, Linnaeus’s name remains widely known, and he is hailed in his country of origin as his own kind of rex-the King of Flowers. It was developed, as you might also remember from your school days, by the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus in the middle of the eighteenth century, an era that was in thrall to the mighty project of trying to systematize all of nature. Inside scientific circles, however, binomial nomenclature still rules the day, lending concision and clarity to fields ranging from molecular biology to evolutionary ecology. Read our reviews of notable new fiction and nonfiction, updated every Wednesday. Also, almost no one outside scientific circles calls the great white shark Carcharodon carcharias. rex that we speak respectfully of species that are potentially dangerous to us-not a bad policy, but also not a good argument, since a fourth example that comes to mind is Aloe vera. You could argue based on those two examples plus T. coli, a bacterium of the genus Escherichia. We know our own full name, of course- Homo sapiens, the last surviving species in a genus that once included Homo habilis, Homo floresiensis, Homo neanderthalensis, and several others-as well as that of the boa constrictor, a snake of the genus Boa, and E. rex, I am aware of only a few that crop up in everyday conversation. rex, of the genus Tyrannosaurus and the species rex, known in full translation as King of the Tyrant Lizards.īinomial names are extremely important to scientists but rarely used by the rest of us. You’ll remember the gist from basic biology: to eliminate any possible overlap or confusion, every species on the planet, whether extant or extinct, is assigned a full name, consisting of its genus (used here as a surname of sorts, indicating to what other creatures it is related) followed by its species, with both halves Latinized, and the genus sometimes reduced to just an initial, like Josef K. That name is itself properly called a binomen, the smallest unit in the vast system known as binomial nomenclature. And here is the most surprising thing that all those ten-year-olds plus pretty much everyone else on the planet know about T. rex: the creature’s proper scientific name. In my experience, such children not only can rattle off the dinosaur’s vital statistics-fifteen feet tall, forty feet long, twelve thousand pounds-but will piously correct any misinformation advanced by their paleontologically passé elders. Last seen some sixty-six million years ago, before an asteroid wiped out three-quarters of the life-forms on earth, it is nonetheless flourishing these days, thanks in large part to Michael Crichton, Steven Spielberg, and elementary-school children all over the world. For the Tyrannosaurus rex, as for Elvis and Jesus, being extremely dead has proved no obstacle to ongoing fame.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |