Wikipedia Article of the Day
Randomly selected articles from my personal browsing history
In biology, taxonomic rank is the relative level of a group of organisms (a taxon) in an ancestral or hereditary hierarchy. A common system of biological classification (taxonomy) consists of species, genus, family, order, class, phylum, kingdom, and domain. While older approaches to taxonomic classification were phenomenological, forming groups on the basis of similarities in appearance, organic structure and behaviour, methods based on genetic analysis have opened the road to cladistics. A given rank subsumes less general categories under it, that is, more specific descriptions of life forms. Above it, each rank is classified within more general categories of organisms and groups of organisms related to each other through inheritance of traits or features from common ancestors. The rank of any species and the description of its genus is basic; which means that to identify a particular organism, it is usually not necessary to specify ranks other than these first two. Consider a particular species, the red fox, Vulpes vulpes: the specific name or specific epithet vulpes (small v) identifies a particular species in the genus Vulpes (capital V) which comprises all the "true" foxes. Their close relatives are all in the family Canidae, which includes dogs, wolves, jackals, and all foxes; the next higher major rank, the order Carnivora, includes caniforms (bears, seals, weasels, skunks, raccoons and all those mentioned above), and feliforms (cats, civets, hyenas, mongooses). Carnivorans are one group of the hairy, warm-blooded, nursing members of the class Mammalia, which are classified among animals with notochords in the phylum Chordata, and with them among all animals in the kingdom Animalia. Finally, at the highest rank all of these are grouped together with all other organisms possessing cell nuclei in the domain Eukarya. The International Code of Zoological Nomenclature defines rank as: "The level, for nomenclatural purposes, of a taxon in a taxonomic hierarchy (e.g. all families are for nomenclatural purposes at the same rank, which lies between superfamily and subfamily)."
History
Oct 17
PageRank
Oct 16
Endowment (Mormonism)
Oct 15
Base32
Oct 14
Fisher–Yates shuffle
Oct 13
Simple Mail Transfer Protocol
Oct 12
Turing completeness
Oct 11
Festivus
Oct 10
Bresenham's line algorithm
Oct 9
Council of Fifty
Oct 8
Étienne Provost
Oct 7
Equal-time rule
Oct 6
Rapeseed oil
Oct 5
Cramér–Rao bound
Oct 4
Lactate threshold
Oct 3
Fairness doctrine
Oct 2
Castle Valley, Utah
Oct 1
2020 Utah gubernatorial election
Sep 30
Tunguska event
Sep 29
Lexicographic order
Sep 28
Cross-site request forgery
Sep 27
Progressive web app
Sep 26
Gerrymandering in the United States
Sep 25
Poisson distribution
Sep 24
Dyatlov Pass incident
Sep 23
Dyatlov Pass incident
Sep 22
Fanum tax
Sep 21
Pollard's p − 1 algorithm
Sep 20
Joe Lo Truglio
Sep 19
Ricky Schroder
Sep 18
Double-entry bookkeeping