Why Do Scientists Classify Organisms?

Why do scientists classify organisms?

The living organisms are classified into several divisions like kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus and species. The organization of the organism is classified into all the above mentioned divisions. This is done by the scientists to look at the information regarding the organisms and the relationship among the divisions is studied properly. The classification of organisms will make it easy for the biologists to gather information about the organisms and study them in order to understand the behavior and characteristics of the organism.

The classification will help to protect different types of animals. For instance, animals which have a pouch are classified under marsupials. Some animals will possess the pouch and 4 legs while some have the pouch as that of previous group but have only 2 legs. So, though they belong to the same genus they belong to different species. One species will have pouch with 4 legs and the other species will have pouch with 2 legs. This is one example where I, there are so many other characteristic features of various animals with different features belonging to various species, genus, orders, families and so on.

In early 1600s living organisms were classified into plants and animals. Later, scientists could find some organisms as those which do not come under either plants or animals. In 1700s Carolus Linnaeus has put forward another classification called modern taxonomy. He classified organisms based on their shape and structure.

Scientists basically classified organisms as they were not able to study all the organisms species by species individually. So they grouped them based on certain characteristic features. The classification also will give everyone an idea about the evolutionary process that is going on in nature and how the genetic material is distributed among the various organisms belonging to different groups. Classification offers the scientists to organize the entire available data for recording and to do research on animals and their habitats.