Assigning Scientific Names

What are the goals of binomial nomenclature and systematics?

The first step in understanding and studying diversity is to describe and name each species. To be useful, each scientific name must refer to one and only one species, and everyone must use the same name for that species. But what kind of name should be used? Common names can be confusing, because they vary among languages and from place to place. The animal in Figure 18–1, for example, can be called a cougar, a puma, a panther, or a mountain lion. Furthermore, different species may share a common name. In the United Kingdom, the word buzzard refers to a hawk, whereas in the United States, buzzard refers to a vulture.

Back in the eighteenth century, European scientists recognized that these kinds of common names were confusing, so they agreed to assign Latin or Greek names to each species. Unhappily, that didn't do much to clear up the confusion. Early scientific names often described species in great detail, so the names could be long. For example, the English translation of the scientific name of a tree might be “Oak with deeply divided leaves that have no hairs on their undersides and no teeth around their edges.” It was also difficult to standardize these names, because different scientists focused on different characteristics. Many of these same characteristics can still be used to identify organisms when using dichotomous keys, as you can see in Figure 18–2.

FIGURE 18–1 Common Names You might recognize this as a cougar, a puma, a panther, or a mountain lion—all common names for the same animal. The scientific name for this animal is Felis concolor.