amphisbaenia
zooillogix | May 22, 2007This month marks Carl Linnaeus' 300th birthday and biology textbooks still look much the way he imagined they should. Linnaeus is the father of the ranking system of classifying the living world. You might remember kingdom, phylum, class, order, genus, species from the back of your hand in 9th grade biology class. Indeed, this system has stood up surprisingly well for almost two and a half centuries despite revolutionary advances in other scientific fields like medicine, where we now know that flu is not caused by a small gnome living in your stomach. Unfortunately for Linnaeus' legacy,…