Carl Linnaeus

This is Carl Linneaus. He’ll be one of the most famous Swedes one day, but right now it’s 1717, and he’s at school studying to become a priest. He’s not very interested in his studies. He skips his lessons and spends his days outside looking at different plants. His teachers don’t think he will ever be a good priest.

One teacher, though, believes that he could be a good doctor and offers to teach him about medicine and the study of plants - botany. He goes to university and becomes a doctor, but is most interested in botany. He travels around rural Sweden making sketches and taking notes on all the plants and animals he observes. And on all the patterns and similarities he notices between them. Based on these similarities, he starts sorting plants and animals into different groups.

He orders things first into big groups called kingdoms. He says that there are three kingdoms of nature: plants, animals, and rocks. Within the kingdoms there are classes, orders, genera, and species. Linnaeus then creates a system that gives living things names with two parts — the binomial classification system. Since Latin is the language used in science, he gives everything a name made of two Latin words.

A species name includes both the genus name and specific name. For example, a domesticated dog and a wolf are members of the same genus, Canis. The dog, however, is the species Canis familiaris, while the wolf is the species Canis lupus. “Lupus” is the latin word for wolf! One of the many plants Linnaeus creates a name for is this little pink flower. It looks pretty, but smells terribly stinky!

It’s said that Linnaeus, who is a humorous man, has a pupil named Robert who does not wash properly. And that’s why he gives the smelly flower the name geranium robertianum! Linnaeus becomes world famous for his work in grouping and naming plants and animals based on their similarities - taxonomy. The first edition of his book outlining his ideas on taxonomy, Systema Naturae, is printed in 1735. Linnaeus is the first to put modern humans, whom he calls homo sapiens, in the animal kingdom.

But, he also classifies homo sapiens further, in controversial and unscientific ways. This is one part of Linneaus’ taxonomy that is not accepted in the modern day. People from all over the world send their specimens to Linnaeus to be included in later editions. In 1753, Linnaeus publishes another book: Species Plantarum. In it, he describes all the plants that are known at the time, around 6,000, and gives their Latin names.

In the book, Linnaeus writes that he’s probably classified most of the plants in the world. His assumption is... a little off. We now know there are over 300,000 species of flowering plants alone! Carl Linnaeus becomes so famous that in 1761 he is knighted by the king and gets a new surname.

That’s why he’s sometimes called Carl von Linné. Linnaeus becomes a professor, and his most talented students travel the world researching plants and animals. They write to him about their discoveries and send back stuffed animals, dried plants, and seeds from Africa, Asia, and the Americas. In his lifetime, Linneaus names over 12,000 species of plants and animals. Today, thousands of plants and animals are discovered every year.

And scientists still use many parts of Linnaeus' system to organize these new species into groups and give them names.