 So today we're going to talk a little bit about classification of organisms and binomial nomenclature, which is a system of naming organisms. So the reason we have to have a system for naming organisms is that there's a problem with just using common names. And I'm going to give you an example from my life that will kind of show why we need to use other systems of naming rather than just common names. So a little bit after college I got hired as an ornithologist to go study some birds in Denmark. And the birds that I was working with were called red kites, and they're a hawk-like bird. And so we had to go out and try to find red kite nests in order to be able to do our research. So myself and some other Danish scientists, some other American scientists, went out looking for these red kite nests. And as we were walking around looking at many birds through our binoculars, many of the Danish scientists kept saying that they were seeing buzzards. They would look at a bird to see if it was a kite and they would say, oh no, it's just a buzzard. And I started being really worried because I started thinking that they had hired me under false pretenses and that they were going to soon find out that I couldn't identify birds because I was looking at those same birds and I wasn't seeing a buzzard. I was seeing what I would call a beauty, which is this bird. What I was thinking was a buzzard. A turkey vulture is also sometimes called a buzzard here in America. So I finally said to them, can you show me what bird in this field guide you're calling a buzzard because I really was so confused and thought I didn't know, you know, what birds I was looking at. I didn't know up from down and that they were going to find out I was a scientific fraud and send me back to America. And so finally it just became obvious that they called beauty owes buzzards. So their common name for this bird was a buzzard and that they would have just called this a vulture, a turkey vulture. So in order to have a naming system, we have to be able to classify organisms. And we classify organisms according to this domain system. And there are three domains, bacteria, archaea and eukarya. And within those domains there are five kingdoms. Within those kingdoms there are phyla. Within those phyla there are classes. Within the classes there are orders. Within each order are families. Within each family is genus and within each genus is a species. So we can use this system of classification to differentiate between different species of organisms because they will each have a unique combination of these classifications. So Carl Linnaeus who was a Swedish scientist came up with a system of binomial nomenclature to determine scientific names. And that is that each species should be named called by its genus and species. Genus is always capitalized, the species is always lowercase, and they're always underline when they're written by hand and italicized when they're written in typeface. So it can be written long hand like this where the whole genus is written out and this whole species is written out or you can abbreviate the genus to just the first letter of the genus. And that gives you the scientific name of an organism. So you can see how that would have been helpful in the system where I was looking for a buzzard in that both the turkey vulture and the beudio have the same classification up to their class, avace, which indicates their birds, but afterwards they're really different. And so if we had just referred to them by their species name and they had mentioned that they were seeing beudio, beudio, I never would have thought that I was out there looking for turkey vultures and not seeing them. So other examples of that misuse of common names or why common names are not a good way to discuss organisms are things like pill bugs, which can also be called potato bugs or roly polis depending on where you live. So scientists need a way to differentiate the organisms they're talking about and the best way the way that we've come up with is Linnaeus's way of binomial nomenclature.