We humans have a tendency to reuse names over and over again. Think of your own first and last name, chances are many other people in the world today share your first and/or last name. Do a Google search on your name and you see just how many other people have the same name as you. This sort of reuse of names can easily lead to confusion when people are trying to talk about a specific person. The way we get around the problem of identifying a specific person is by adding a whole bunch of qualifiers and extra descriptions to the person's name, like this. Hey, do you know Henry Fonda? Not the actor, the street musician, who used to busk on Monday Mornings, down in the King Street Subway station, back in the 90's. The problem with identifying specific things, plagued scientists for many years. Then, in the mid 1700's. Scientists started to give every species its own unique name. This actually led to an interesting set of other problems with specific identification. To investigate this, let's look back to Europe in the 18th century, and see how and why we humans started to give each organism their own, one of a kind, name. Imagine you're a scientist living during the early 18th Century. You observed nature and see a wide variety of plants and animals. You give names to all of these different forms. This system works well for you and you can then write all sorts of interesting books on the organisms you see. Referring to them by name. The problem is, what happens when someone else writes a book and they talk about these same animals and plants, but they decide to use different names to describe them? Well, that's exactly what happened. And, things got very confusing very quickly. A situation developed where some people called a plant by one name and another group of people called it by a different name. Now most scientific writing at this time was done in Latin so it wasn't that the names were in different languages but that different people called the same organism by different names. As we know from our example of trying to differentiate two people with the same name. Scientists try to cut through the confusion of organism naming by being more and more descriptive. names for organisms became longer and longer. As you can imagine the situation rapidly became a complete mess. Now, not only were organisms called different things, by different groups of people, but the names became very long, and more and more confusing. To complicate matters, this was the era of European expansion. New animals and plants from all over the world were being brought back to Europe by the ship load. They were all being named different things by different scientists. Scientists estimated there were around ten thousand different species in the world in the 18th century. How many species do you think there actually are on earth? Check the answer you think is correct. Is it ten thousand? one hundred thousand? One million or ten million. Recent estimates suggest that there are between five and 30 million species on earth. We don't really know and may never know the exact number. Many species are incredibly small, hard to identify and difficult to study. So D is the closest number we have to a correct answer. It was in this mess of thousands of confusing and overlapping names that Carl Linnaeus emerged. Linnaeus was a Swedish scientist in the 18th century. He was a medical doctor, botanist, and zoologist. Linnaeus wrote an enormous book that listed all known organisms. While he was writing the book he decided to use a simple two part naming scheme. For every creature and plants on Earth. To avoid the confusion, rampant in Europe at this time, he made sure that no two name combinations were the same. This radical simplification turned out to be an important turning point in how we give formal names to organisms. By using a two part or binomial name unique to each organism, confusion could be eliminated. As long as everyone in a scientific community agree to use this exact system. Well, everyone agreed. And we still use Linnaeus system today for naming everything from tomato plants to ancient dinosaurs. Now you've probably seen binomial names before, written both correctly and incorrectly. There are specific rules to follow when you write a species name. Unfortunately, non technical publications don't always follow the rules. But we'll be more rigorous. Let's start with a name that Linnaeus gave to human beings. Homo sapiens. You'll note as I said before, that this is in Latin. At the time of Linnaeus, Latin was the language of science in Europe. Modern names can be derived from other languages, but often the fallback for many is still Latin. The name is made up of two parts, the genus, or generic name, Homo, meaning man, and the specific epithet, sapiens, meaning wise. Together these two parts make up the binomial species name homo sapiens. When we write a species name, the genus name is capitalized while the specific epithet is in lowercase. And that the whole name is written in italics. This is a convention that help us to know when we are looking at a proper species name. And not just a common name for an organism. So, to review: what is the proper way to write the species name for humans? The proper species name for humans is C. Homo sapiens written in italic type with the genus name capitalized. We have a number of rules that we follow for naming species that, though they may seem finicky, are important for maintaining consistency when you have millions of different people who need to talk about specific species. Whether they be paleontologists. Marine biologists or bird watchers. So, a species name is unique. There can't be two even closely related species named the same thing. As an example, let's take a look at one of the dinosaurs we have here in Alberta. It's called Edmontosaurus. There are actually two species of Edmontosaurus, Edmontosaurus regalis and Edmontosarus annectens. We can reuse the genus Edmontosaurus for these two closely related species because we have used a different specific epithet regalis and annectens for each of the species. Since Linnaeus started naming species in the 18th century with binomial names most species on the planet have been given names. In fact Linnaeus named several thousands of them himself. But there are rules governing when and how something new gets named. For example, you can't just rename something that someone else has already named. If that were allowed then names of species would still be a complete mess. People would be renaming things all the time. Instead there's a Rule of Priority. That is once a species has been named and widely distributed. Easily accessible in peer reviewed publication, it can't be named again or renamed. The only exception to this rule are if organisms were given the same name as another, which does happen by accident from time to time. Or if the organism wasn't really a new species at all. In this case, it gets lumped back in with the old species. Here's a question for you. Which of these publications is somewhere you could name a new species? The Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, National Geographic Magazine. Or Nature: International Weekly Journal of Science. Check the answer you think is correct. The only one of these you can officially name a new species in is Nature. While all the others are well respected publications and have enormous readership. They do not go through the process of peer review. That is, when a scientist submits an article to Nature to be published, two other qualified scientists in the same field, not involved with the study, will review the article to see if it is scientifically sound
