What's in a name?

Taxonomy, the science how things are classified, is how animals are categorized and let us know what creatures we have already discovered. There are seven main categories, with the broadest listed first:

Kingdom

Phylum

Class

Order

Family

Genus 

Species

An easy way to remember this is Keep Pots Clean Or Family Gets Sick!

Kingdom

This is the most simplistic category. Some kingdoms include Plantae (plants), Animalia (animals), and Fungi (fungus). This way we can tell what ever thing we are looking at is an animal or  a plant.

Phylum

Phylum is the next category that lists a common characteristic of the animal. Most of the time, it whether or not the animal has some kind of backbone. Most creatures with backbones, like dogs, snakes, birds, and ourselves fall under the phylum known as Chordata. Animals without backbones, like mollusks, spiders, and butterflies, are put in the phylum Anthropoda.

Class

Class gets more specific by letting us know what kind of creature we are looking at. Examples of class are Mammalia (mammals), which contains animals that are covered with hair, have developed offspring that's not in eggs (except for a few special mammals), and produce milk to support their young, and Reptillia (reptiles), containing creatures that are cold blooded and their babies hatch from eggs. 

Order

With in each class is an order. Within the class Mammalia, there is the order of Rodenta (rodents like squirrels, mice, rats, and hamsters), Carnivora (carnivores or meat eaters like cats, dogs, and bears), Insectivora (insect eaters like moles and shrews), as well as Artidactyla (even toed hoofed animals like deer, antelopes, sheep, and hippos). The Primate order contains monkey, apes, lemurs, and ourselves. As you can see, it is getting more and more specific. 

Family

Family contains all the members of one type of animal. These animals all share a common feature and generally look kind of the same. All cats (Felidae family) have whiskers, all rabbits (Leporidae family) have long ears and long back legs. Within the Canis family includes wolves, coyotes, foxes, and the domestic dog.

Genus

Genus is more complex than family. For example is the domestic dog (Canis lupus familiars). This genus contains all the types of dogs that are out there in the world. All big cats like lions, tigers, leopards, and jaguars belong to the Panthera genus.

Species

Species gives a very specific name for an animal. Both genus and species together creates an animals bionomen, or it's scientific name. So within the Panthera you have leo (lions), tigris (tigers), pardus (leopards), and onca (jaguar). Species names are commonly named after the location they are found, their color, or the person who found them. For example the okapi (Okapia johnstoni), it's species is named after the man that led the expedition that led to it's discovery. Any living things scientific name is written in italics, with it's Genus written first with a uppercase, followed by it's species in all lower case, like this: Genus species.

Below are some examples of taxonomy. We can tell by their classification that the animals are relative to one another. At one time, they shared a common ancestor.

Source:  Integrated Principles of  Zoology, 2006, Hickman et al.

The Encyclopedia of Animals, 2006, Per Christiansen