Question

The word 'species' was coined by
1. John Ray
2. Mayer
3. J. Huxley
4. C. Linnaeus

Answer 1

Correct Answer - Option 1 : John Ray

The correct answer is John Ray.

• The word 'species' was coined by John Ray.
• A species is a group of living organisms containing similar individuals capable of interbreeding.
• Taxonomic studies consider a group of individual organisms with fundamental similarities as a species.
• Species is the basic unit of classification.
• Species is the ranking below a genus and denoted by a Latin binomial.
• Each genus may have one or more than one specific epithets representing different organisms.

• Biologists, such as Ernst Haeckel, Robert Whittaker, and Carl Woese tried to classify all living organisms into broad categories called kingdoms.
• Further classification is done by naming the sub-groups at various levels- kingdom, phylum or division, class, order, family, genus, species.
• This is also known as the Taxonomic hierarchy.
• Taxonomic hierarchy is the process of arranging various organisms into successive levels of the biological classification either in a decreasing or an increasing order from kingdom to species and vice versa.