Title
Further Investigations: Classification of Life
Table of Contents
- Create an identification key for a set of organisms. Consider the following:
- How do you know if your key works?
- What kinds of characteristics were most useful in your key?
- Which “organisms would be easiest to confuse in your key?
- How is language and word choice important when making a key?
- Choose any organism you are interested in and do a webquest to find out about its classification.
- What are the features that it has that caused it to be placed within each level of classification? What do the different names mean or refer to?
- Write a short description of it based upon its classification.
- How unique is it? (How many species are in its class, order, family, and genus?)
- Using a list of Latin and Greek root words, suffixes, and prefixes, develop a scientific name for:
- yourself.
- a classmate.
- an actor or musician.
- a famous athlete.
- Is the Linnean system a good tool for classification that should remain in place, or should it be discarded in favor of a different system? If you were charged with improving the current system, or even developing a new one, what would you do?
