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Taxonomy is the science of classifying living things. Scientists have catalogued about 1.5 million species, so they need a clear system to keep track of them.

The system is named after the scientist Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778). Big groups are split into smaller and smaller groups: kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus and species.

Animals, plants and fungi are in different kingdoms. Fungi cannot photosynthesise; they release digestive enzymes and absorb their food. DNA shows that fungi are more closely related to animals than to plants.

Experiment: Build and test a key

1. Lay out all the pictures. List features you can see: legs (how many?), wings, shell, fins, leaves…
2. Write a first question that splits the whole set into two groups, for example 'Does it have legs?'
3. For each group, write a new question that splits it again. Use only features you can see, not 'Is it nice?'
4. Keep going until every organism is on its own. Draw your key as a branching tree.
5. Swap keys with another group. Can they identify each organism correctly using only your questions?
6. Fix any question that confused them.

Organism	Identified correctly by the other group? (yes / no)	Question that caused a problem
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Questions

1. Put these groups in order from biggest to smallest: species, kingdom, genus, family, class, order, phylum.

2. Write the wolf's scientific name correctly. Which part is the genus?

3. Give one reason why scientists use scientific names instead of common names.

4. Did the other group identify all your organisms correctly? Which question did you improve, and how?

Sources for every fact on this sheet: echoesof.science/school/classification/sources/

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