What type of scientist was linnaeus

Never a modest man, Linnaeus at age 33 claimed he was the scientific equal to Newton and Galileo. He died of a stroke in Much of his basic work on species classification is still used today, with many new ideas, of course, being incorporated.

During his lifetime, he made several expeditions to parts of Sweden where he described the plants, animals, and in some cases the cultural aspects of each area. The accompanying hand-drawn maps are from books written by Linnaeus that resulted from these trips. These books are treasures from our very own rare book room. Subscribe to our blog. Receive an email once a week that recaps the latest blog posts about our research, exhibitions, cool science news, and more.

Search for. But memorising scientific plant names was extremely difficult — each one was known by a long description in Latin. In the s, Linneaus undertook expeditions to Lapland and central Sweden, before finishing his medical degree at the University of Harderwijk in the Netherlands.

While enrolled at the University of Leiden he published his famous Systema Naturae — a new way of classifying living organisms. Over the years, Linnaeus revised this classification system, which soon became a huge, multivolume work. It grouped all species into higher categories, known as taxa: genera, orders, classes and kingdoms. Central to this system was binomial nomenclature — the idea that all organisms should be described by only two Latin words: one denoting its genus, and another its species.

Two-word Latin names had been used before, but Linnaeus was the first to apply this approach extensively and consistently, and it soon caught on as the standard naming system for animals and plants. In it, the unwieldy descriptions used previously - physalis amno ramosissime ramis angulosis glabris foliis dentoserratis - were replaced by the concise and now familiar genus-species names - Physalis angulata - and higher taxa were constructed in a simple and orderly manner.

Linnaeus named taxa in ways that personally struck him as common-sensical; for example, human beings are Homo sapiens "wise man", but he also described a second human species, Homo troglodytes or Homo nocturnus - "cave-dwelling man" or "nocturnal man" , by which he seems to have meant the only-recently described chimpanzee.

The group "mammalia" are named for their breasts because he wanted to encourage women to breast-feed their infants. In Linnaeus married Sara Morea, daughter of a physician. He ascended the chair of medicine at Uppsala two years later, soon exchanging it for the chair of Botany.