Who was carl linnaeus and what did he do?
Linnaeus was a Swedish botanist who started our modern system of classification. 1. He classified organisms according to similarities in structure – logical today, but unusual then. 2. He started the seven levels of classification: kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species. 3. He began giving living things two-part scientific names based on Latin. The term for this is binomial nomenclature. The first name is the genus; the second is the species. 4. He named countless species. Look in any field guide. The L. after the scientific name tells us that the name was given by Linnaeus. After all this Latin naming, he began going by the name Carolus Linnaeus, rather than the Carl von Linne which he was given at birth.
