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In scientific classification used in biology, the 'order' (Latin: ''ordo'', plural ''ordines'') is a rank between class and family (termed a taxon at that rank). The 'superorder' is a rank between ''class'' and ''order''. Exact details of formal nomenclature depend on the Nomenclature Code which applies.

Contents

History of the concept

Botany

Zoology

See also

History of the concept

The order as a distinct rank of biological classification having its own distinctive name (and not just called a ''higher genus'' ''(genus summum))'' was first introduced by a German botanist, Augustus Quirinus Rivinus in his classification of plants (of treatises in the 1690s). Carolus Linnaeus was the first to apply it consistently to the division of all three kingdoms of Nature (minerals, plants, and animals) in his ''Systema Naturae'' (1735, 1st. Ed.).

Botany

It should be noted that for plants the Linnaean orders, in the ''Systema Naturae'' and the ''Species Plantarum'', were strictly artificial, introduced to subdivide the artificial classes into more comprehensible smaller groups. When the word ''ordo'' was first consistently used for natural units of plants, in nineteenth century works such as the ''Prodromus'' of de Candolle and the ''Genera Plantarum'' of Bentham & Hooker, it indicated taxa that are now given the rank of family (see ''ordo naturalis'').
In French botanical publications, from Michel Adanson's ''Familles naturelles des plantes'' (1763) and until the end of the 19th century, the word ''famille'' (plural: ''familles'') was used as a French equivalent for this Latin ''ordo''. This equivalence was explicitly stated in the Alphonse De Candolle's ''Lois de la nomenclature botanique'' (1868), the precursor of the currently used ''International Code of Botanical Nomenclature''.
In the first international ''Rules'' of botanical nomenclature of 1906 the word family (''familia'') was assigned to the rank indicated by the French "famille", while order (''ordo'') was reserved for a higher rank, for what in the nineteenth century had often been named a ''cohors'' (plural ''cohortes'').

Zoology

In zoology, the Linnaean orders were used more consistently. That is, the orders in the zoology part of the ''Systema Naturae'' refer to natural groups. Some of his ordinal names are still in use (e.g. Lepidoptera for the order of moths and butterflies, or Diptera for the order of flies, mosquitoes, midges, and gnats).

See also

★ Turkey Karadeniz Technical University Biology Students Site(Forum)

★ Turkey Karadeniz Technical University Biology Students Site (Portal)

★ Cladistics

★ Phylogenetics

★ Systematics

★ Taxonomy

★ Scientific classification

★ Rank (botany)

★ Rank (zoology)

★ Virus classification