Examine the buttonhole.

I have been looking for this flower for years, not least because it was Linnaeus’s (as in Carolus “Father of Taxonomy” Linnaeus) favorite flower in the world. Nearly every painting you see of him shows him clasping or otherwise displaying a pair of the dainty blossoms. They were on his coat of arms.

For years I’ve gazed at them in my flower books, hoping and waiting and trying to be patient for the day. That day was Saturday. My mushrooming buddy Johnny was there to see it, and he patiently endured five minutes of me exclaiming over the low mat of little pink flowers. I tried to sniff for the “light vanilla scent” one of my books advised me they would have, but I could detect nothing. I don’t care. They are awesome.

Twinflowers are in the Honeysuckle family, the Caprifoliaceae (Kap’-ri-fo-lee-ase’-ee-ay). The Honeysuckle family is notorious for producing flowers in . . . you guessed it . . . pairs. The sweet honeysuckle blossoms of southeast Tennessee I remember from my youth came in pairs; the kids used to say you could pluck them and suck the nectar, though I don’t recall ever being successful at that. At the foray this weekend, someone came up to me to ask me about another plant he’d found with glossy twin black berries mounted on shiny red bracts; it was the bracted honeysuckle, or black twinberry, yet another member of the family. It was a Caprifoliaceae kind of weekend.

Twinflower is unusual because it grows in a low green mat rather than a woody shrub, like most honeysuckle. I even found a clump this weekend growing right on top of a tree stump (pictured above. You can also see the pixie stick form of Cladonia lichen mingling with the twinflower as if they were at a cross-kingdom cocktail party). Twinflower is, as its name implies, circumpolar in the northern hemisphere, which is why both Linnaeus and I can enjoy them, despite the fact that I’ve never been to Sweden, and he never experienced the Rocky Mountain High.

The common skate, Dipturus batis. This, obviously, is the not-up side, referred to by zoologists as "ventral" (the opposite of "dorsal"). Botanists would call it "abaxial". Image by Misjel Decleer, published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike 3.0 license. Click image for link.

Just in case you thought taxonomy was a strictly useless pursuit . . .

. . . and you can see how skates fit into the rest of the cartilaginous fish (fish with cartilage skeletons like sharks) here.

An 1879 tree by Ernst Haeckel with a bit of a bias. The true tree of life is trunkless -- more of a shrub of life, really. There's a root, but no apex. If forced to choose one, personally, my money's on Theobroma cacao.

Last time I posted a link to a slide show of beautiful jellies. But I don’t want this blog to be only about eye candy. I want to help you learn about new organisms, the often crazy or amazing ways they make their livings, and no less importantly, how they are related and classified.

Because I hope to make this blog accessible to all sorts of readers, from precocious 10-year-olds on up, I’ve struggled with how to help you learn about taxonomy without making you digest the long lists of incomprehensible names found in abundance on most trees. On top of that, I face the problem that classifications are constantly changing.

The Trouble with Trees

Today scientists classify organisms based on how they are related to one another, but unfortunately, it’s often quite confusing to figure out. Sometimes comparing one trait — say, tentacle length — yields  one family tree (often called phylogenetic trees by scientists), and comparing another trait  — say, mean number of biologists devoured attempting to study organism — yields a conflicting one. Which is correct? Which traits should you give more weight when constructing the tree you think most likely? This is the problem that has launched a thousand theses. Scientists argue about the true relationships constantly, and the trees are rearranged with every publication of a systematics journal.

On top of that, once scientists started sequencing the genes of different organisms and making trees by comparing them, traditional taxonomies that had been stable for decades or centuries based on body shape, anatomy, or other observable traits were often upended, leaving things in disarray to this day. And finally, the formal names we give ranks above species like kingdom, phylum, class, order, etc., are largely arbitrary, as is the idea that there are exactly seven ranks. There aren’t. The ranks are meaningless as absolute markers, so teaching these names seems to me both confusing and pointless.

And yet . . .

The Learning Tree

Some major groups have remained supported by scientific consensus, and other new groups are settling down. And there are true evolutionary relationships among organisms, and themes within lineages of common descent, though individual species can differ radically from their close kin. Learning the major groups helps keep the dizzying diversity of Earth organized in our brains. Strange new species will no longer float around like stray mental post-it notes, but have a taxonomic hook to hang on when you can say . . . ah, that new creature is an annelid. I know exactly which other creatures it’s related to.

So I’m going to try to start including links to trees with each post. It’ll be up to you to explore them as your fancy strikes you. One site I will rely on heavily is the Tree of Life Web Project. Although the descriptions there are often written by scientists for scientists and will be nigh incomprehensible to the lay person, anyone can look at the trees and get a sense of who is related to who and how. Plus pretty pictures help with scary names. : ) Another benefit  to studying these trees is seeing how many different organisms are out there that you will never have heard of, and about which so little is known. Virtually every page contains groups that even I — with six years of higher education in biology and a passion for, shall we say, creative life forms — have never heard of.

So here we go: For jellies and friends, which are contained in a group with the formidable name Cnidaria (ni-DAR-ee-a), you can see the TOL trees here and here and a cuter and more digestible, if less rigorous, tree here. Cnidaria was one of the first animal groups surviving today to split from the rest of the animals — and it shows.

In my last post I discussed Carol Yoon’s recent article and book on the decline of taxonomy among scientists and the public. Taxonomy, which could easily be a dinner conversation subject and hobby for most of the 19th century (TR had quite extensive collections in his youth, for example), has virtually vanished among the general public today. This was brought to my own attention a few weeks ago, when I discovered a second grade primer published in 1897 on the desk of a colleague who collects old maps.

I opened and began skimming. The inside cover announced in spidery childhood cursive that the book had belonged to one Mildred Pennington, of Cuba, Ohio.

I looked up Cuba, Ohio on Google Maps and discovered it is nothing but the intersection of  a highway with one or two buildings now.

The first 16 pages were, unfortunately, missing. Here’s the copyright page and the first existing page of the text. The image should be familiar to every American . . .You Know Who is standing in the doorway watching.

The engravings that illustrated the text were astoundingly beautiful, and stories were an impressive assortment of “modern” tales, fairy tales, and fables. And there were two stories from ancient times, one set in Rome called “Androclus and the Lion”, and another set in Persia, called “Filling a Basket with Water”. Here is an engraving from the Persian story.

There also seemed to be a fair balance of stories calculated to appeal to either boys or girls.

But what struck me even more was the way natural history permeated the book. There was a story about a boy who nursed the broken wing of a bat he named Bobby, and stories on the natural history of bees and butterflies and the beaks of birds.

Finally, the elusive snipe is found!

And gloriously, On p. 20-22 in the margins were beautiful line engravings and the names of eight different species of oak (scarlet oak on last page not shown).

At the end of the story, the text asks the student, “Do you know how many kinds of oaks there are? Find as many kinds of acorns as you can. Find as many kinds of oak leaves as you can. Which kind of oak tree grows the tallest? Which kind bears the largest acorns? Which kind has the smoothest bark?”

Remember, this is a reading primer, not a biology or science book.

According to Yoon’s article, a two-year old child of the Tzetzal Maya people of Mexico can name 30 plants, and a four-year old, 100. How many can you name?

At the end of the book is this page. I thought you might like to see it too.

And being Victorians, they couldn’t help but embellish the back cover as well . . .

The father of taxonomy, one of my three science heroes, and the inventor of the index card: Carolus Linnaeus. In his buttonhole is his favorite flower, the twinflower, subsequently named Linnea borealis in his honor. Note the powder on his coat from his wig. Painting by Alexander Roslin.

That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, claimed Juliet, but could she say the same for a nameless rose? Perhaps not. In case you missed it this week, fellow Cornell alum and science writer Carol Kaesuk Yoon produced a lovely article in the New York Times adapted from her new book on the decline of taxonomy that is well worth your time.

Taxonomy — the science of naming and classifying organisms — and the study of obscure organisms have been dying long slow deaths, as any taxonomist can tell you. Funding for such projects has often been usurped for molecular, pharmaceutical, or biotechnical work. And of course, these projects are important.

But so is taxonomy, and Yoon argues that the discovery and naming of life is a deep-seated biological urge among humans. Cultures everywhere sort living things into the same basic categories and feel the same urge to give them two-part names. Briar rose, it seems, is even sweeter. This urge is apart from any value we might derive from discovering among new organisms new pharmaceuticals or modes of operating a cell that could inspire us medically or biotechnically (and believe me, the number of crazy ways you can operate a cell is mind-boggling. Click on any group here to get an idea).

More startlingly, she describes research showing it is possible for people to suffer brain injury that makes them unable to recognize anything living, while remaining perfectly capable of recognizing a toaster or stapler. In my conscious mind, I barely remember that something like a carrot is living at all, it’s so far removed from its natural setting. Consciously, I classify it more as food. But people with this disorder cannot look at a carrot and tell you what it is because it is living, regardless of whether you or I or they would consciously think of it that way when naming it. What an amazing finding! Regardless of our difficulty as scientists at deciding on the boundaries of life (see viruses), something deep and innate in human brains does so instantly and unconsciously, and uses it to classify and store new ideas in the index of our minds.

If taxonomy has been declining among scientists, it has virtually disappeared among the general public. Tomorrow I’ll share a small revelation I had in this regard when I stumbled a few weeks ago upon a 19th-century second grade reading primer.