Wikibooks: Anatomy and Physiology of Animals/Classification

• Format: Book
• Language: English
• Subjects: Gato; Thumb; Rattus rattus
• Online Access: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Anatomy_and_Physiology_of_Animals/Classification

[[thumb 400px right original image by cc by]] =Objectives= After completing this section you should know how to write the scientific name of animals correctly know that animals belong to the Animal kingdom and that this is divided into phyla classes orders families know the definition of a species know the phylum and class of the more common animals dealt with in this course Classification is the process used by scientists to make sense of the 1.5 million or so different kinds of living organisms on the planet. It does this by describing naming and placing them in different groups. As veterinary nurses you are mainly concerned with the Animal Kingdom but don’t forget that animals rely on the Plant Kingdom for food to survive. Also many diseases that animals are affected by are members of the other Kingdoms—fungi bacteria and single celled animals. =Naming And Classifying Animals= There are more than 1.5 million different kinds of living organism on Earth ranging from small and simple bacteria to large complex mammals. From the earliest time that humans have studied the natural world they have named these living organisms and placed them in different groups on the basis of their similarities and differences. =Naming Animals= Of course we know what a cat a dog and a whale are but in some situations using the common names for animals can be confusing. Problems arise because people in different countries and even sometimes in the same country have different common names for the same animals. For example a cat can be a chat a Katze gato katt or a moggie depending on which language you use. To add to the confusion sometimes the same name is used for different animals. For example the name ‘gopher’ is used for ground squirrels rodents (pocket gophers) for moles and in the south eastern United States for a turtle. This is the reason why all animals have been given an official scientific or binomial name . Unfortunately these names are always in Latin. For example Common rat Rattus rattus Human Homo sapiens ...