Swedish botanist.
1707-
1778. Also called
Carl Linnaeus, or just
Linnaeus.
He is most famous for his work Systema Naturae, in which he classified species. Because of this, he is sometimes known as the Father Of Taxonomy.
Linnaeus was first and foremost a botanist, as was his father, Nils, but he also received his medical degree in 1735, the year he published Systema Naturae. In this manuscript (which grew with the years, as he studied more species, and received samples of other species from abroad), he classified living things. It is interesting to note that he lived long before Darwin's The Origin Of Species came out. And yet, most of his classifications fit in very well with Darwin's theory.
Although primarily a botanist, he classified animals as well, and to me, one of the most interesting classifications he made was of Primates. Among the names he gave are these:
He was off in that chimpanzees don't live in caves. But nevertheless, he grouped the three species in the same
genus, meaning an incredible similarity between the three. (He did not classify
gorillas as they had not been discovered yet (they were discovered in 1799)). Today we know that this genetic similarity is indeed true (of course, he saw it as a
biological, not
genetic similarity).
Many years later, mostly due to people not wanting to be related to apes, the chimpanzees' genus was changed to pan, and the orang-utans' genus to pongo. (The gorillas' genus is gorilla). By all tests of genetic similarity, we should be with the chimps and the gorillas.