What's in a Species Name?
The most famous Latin name for a species must surely be “Tyrannosaurus rex”. Or just T.rex , as all dino fans know it so fondly. Recently I learnt that the naming convention for species (called “binomial nomenclature” ) has 2 parts: - The first part is the genus; ( I have no clue what a genus means! ) - The second identifies the species within the genus. Now keep in mind that we came up with this convention a couple of centuries back. And therefore, the genus was being decided based on appearance and visible (or inferable) attributes of the specimen. Today, writes Svante Pääbo in his excellent book, Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes , we can study the DNA of a specimen to know which species shared ancestors, and which ones are ancestors of which others. And so often we find that seemingly unrelated species shared common ancestors, or one was an ancestor of the other, ...