A time ago people like Aristotle, a Greek philosopher started grouping animals based on where they lived and what they looked like. Then a Swedish botanist named Carolus Linnaeus came up with a way to classify living things in the Century. This system is still used everywhere today.
The Taxonomic Hierarchy is like a list of categories that go from biggest to smallest or smallest to biggest. The Kingdom is the group and the species is the smallest group in this list.
Let us take a look at the Taxonomic Hierarchy in Biological Classification.
So what is the Taxonomic Hierarchy?
The word Taxonomy comes from the words "taxis" which means putting things in order and "nomos" which means a way of doing things.
Taxonomy is a part of Biology that deals with grouping living things. A taxon is a group of living things that are classified together.
The Taxonomic Hierarchy is a way of putting living things into levels either from the biggest group to the smallest or the other way around from Kingdom to species and back again.
Each level, in the Hierarchy is called a taxonomic category or rank.
In this system the Kingdom is always the group, followed by the division, class order, family, genus and then the species. The Taxonomic Hierarchy is used to classify living things in an order and it always starts with the Kingdom and ends with the species or it can start with the species and go up to the Kingdom.
What is Taxonomic Hierarchy?
The word “Taxonomy” is derived from a Greek word – “taxis”, meaning arrangement or division, and “nomos”, meaning method.
Taxonomy is a branch of Biology that refers to the process of classifying different living species. A taxon is referred to as a group of organisms classified as a unit.
“Taxonomic hierarchy is the process of arranging various organisms into successive levels of the biological classification either in a decreasing or an increasing order from kingdom to species and vice versa.”
