Rudbeckia hirta. Solanum lycopersicum. Acer saccharum. Have you ever seen these names on plant tags or seed packets and wondered where they came from? We can thank Carl Linnaeus for taxonomy, the ...

The name Homo sapiens—Latin for “wise man”—has always carried an air of self-congratulation. Carl Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy, coined the term in 1758, confident that his species stood ...

Linnaeus collected 643 different plant species that were then fed to horses, cows, pigs, sheep and goats. The results were carefully compiled but not analyzed until now, 275 years later. Are cows ...

Few visitors to London’s Royal Academy, as they walk under the great arch into the courtyard of Burlington House, W1, realise that somewhere beneath their feet, in a bombproof bunker built at the ...

Two botanical luminaries – Carl Linnaeus and David Fairchild – never met, but both were stunned by the beauty of palms, considering them the best the plant kingdom had to offer. Linnaeus (1707-1778) ...

Language changes all the time. Words get new meanings. New words get made up. I talked about it with my friend Rich Zack. He’s an insect scientist at Washington State University. He does taxonomy.