Order (biology)

For some clades covered by the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature, several additional classifications are sometimes used, although not all of these are officially recognized.

In their 1997 classification of mammals, McKenna and Bell used two extra levels between superorder and order: grandorder and mirorder.

[8] 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 the German botanist Augustus Quirinus Rivinus in his classification of plants that appeared in a series of treatises in the 1690s.

Carl Linnaeus was the first to apply it consistently to the division of all three kingdoms of nature (then minerals, plants, and animals) in his Systema Naturae (1735, 1st.

When the word ordo was first consistently used for natural units of plants, in 19th-century works such as the Prodromus Systematis Naturalis Regni Vegetabilis of Augustin Pyramus de Candolle and the Genera Plantarum of Bentham & Hooker, it indicated taxa that are now given the rank of family (see ordo naturalis, 'natural order').

In the first international Rules of botanical nomenclature from the International Botanical Congress of 1905, 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 19th century had often been named a 'cohort' (cohors,[10] plural cohortes).

Some of his ordinal names are still in use, e.g. Lepidoptera (moths and butterflies) and Diptera (flies, mosquitoes, midges, and gnats).