Classification

Drag and drop the office supplies into groups based on what characteristics you see. Use the pen to write why you separated them that way and then go to the next slide.

CLASSIFICATION: A brief history

One of the earliest known classification systems was created by Aristotle, a Greek philosopher who lived from 384–322 BC. He classified more than 500 species of animals in a book, separating them on the basis of if they had blood (vertebrates) or no blood (invertebrates). His pupil, Theophrastus, wrote a similar piece of work classifying plants. Many years later, the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) described a 2-kingdom system of living things: animalia and plantae (he also described a third, non-living kingdom of minerals). Linnaeus devised a nested hierarchical system for classifying groups of organisms based on their similarities. He had five levels of classification: Kingdom, Class, Order, Genera and Species. This system has been modified over the years, with additional levels of classification added. There have since been 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 kingdom systems proposed. There is still not consensus within the scientific community on which system to use (most modern textbooks refer to the 5 or 6 kingdom system).