Order (biology)

Hierarchy of ranks

Zoology

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. Michael Novacek (1986) inserted them at the same position. Michael Benton (2005) inserted them between superorder and magnorder instead. This position was adopted by Systema Naturae 2000 and others.

Botany

In botany, the ranks of subclass and suborder are secondary ranks pre-defined as respectively above and below the rank of order. Any number of further ranks can be used as long as they are clearly defined.

The superorder rank is commonly used, with the ending -anae that was initiated by Armen Takhtajan's publications from 1966 onwards.

History

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. Ed.).

Botany

For plants, Linnaeus' 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 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 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 's Lois de la nomenclature botanique (1868), the precursor of the currently used International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants.

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, plural cohortes).

Some of the plant families still retain the names of Linnaean "natural orders" or even the names of pre-Linnaean natural groups recognized by Linnaeus as orders in his natural classification (e.g. Palmae or Labiatae). Such names are known as descriptive family names.

Zoology

In the field of 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 (moths and butterflies) and Diptera (flies, mosquitoes, midges, and gnats).

Virology

From 1991 to 2017, order was the highest rank used to classify viruses in a system that ranged from order to species. In 2018, the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses, which oversees virus taxonomy, added ranks higher than order up to the highest taxonomic rank of realm. Virus orders are indicated by the suffix -virales.

References

Works cited

References

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3. {{harvnb. McNeill et al. 2012. Article 17.1
4. Leo S. Berg. (1940). "Classification of fishes, both recent and fossil". J. N. Edwards.
5. (1997). "Classification of Mammals". Columbia University Press.
6. Benton, Michael J.. (2005). "Vertebrate Palaeontology". Blackwell Publishing.
7. {{harvnb. McNeill et al. 2012. Article 4
8. Naik, V.N.. (1984). "Taxonomy of Angiosperms". Tata McGraw-Hill.
9. Linnaeus, Carolus. (1758). "Systema naturae per regna tria naturae :secundum classes, ordines, genera, species, cum characteribus, differentiis, synonymis, locis". Laurentius Salvius.
10. Briquet, J.. (1912). "Règles internationales de la nomenclature botanique adoptées par le congrès international de botanique de Vienne 1905, deuxième edition mise au point d'après les décisions du congrès international de botanique de Bruxelles 1910; International rules of botanical nomenclature adopted by the International Botanical Congresses of Vienna 1905 and Brussels 1910; Internationale Regeln der botanischen Nomenclatur angenommen von den Internationalen Botanischen Kongressen zu Wien 1905 und Brüssel 1910". Gustav Fischer.
11. [[Carl Linnaeus. (1806). "Volume 2: Insects". Lackington, Allen, and Co.
12. International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses Executive Committee. (May 2020). "The New Scope of Virus Taxonomy: Partitioning the Virosphere Into 15 Hierarchical Ranks". Nat Microbiol.
13. (March 2025). "The International Code of Virus Classification and Nomenclature (ICVCN; the ICTV Code)". International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses.