Kathy Roper, age 13, of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada, for her question:

Who invented the animal classifications?

His name was Carl von Lynne, known to the world of science as Carolus Linnaeus  ¬or just plain Linnaeus. This orderly scientist lived from 1707 to 1778 and his native home was Sweden. His interests were botany in particular and the whole world of nature in general. Linnaeus realized that he needed some precise system of classifications to organize all his topics. No such system existed at the time. So he organized one, first for his beloved plants and later adapted it for the animals.

The basic system seems simple to us    perhaps because patient Linnaeus spent so many years getting it organized and streamlined.  He gave each kind of animal two names, a genus name which he shared with a few close cousins and a species name all his own. Genera of fairly close cousins were grouped in a family, families into orders, orders into classes and classes into phyla. As a rule, Linnaeus used Greek or Latin words with elues to name his creatures and catagories. Since his day, many more species have been listed and a few of his groups modified in the light of new information. But we still use the workable basic system than Linnaeus originated two centuries ago.