Aristotle devised and began to develop the first biological taxonomy during a tour of the eastern Aegean in 347 BC. While taxonomies of other things were quite common at the time, no one had yet attempted to classify living things in any systematic way. Aristotle's taxonomy was not merely a means of organizing knowledge of the animal kingdom but was actually the attempt to describe the universe as it really is; in other words, his taxonomy was a description of the "natural" places of everything in the universe. The biological level of this taxonomy was divided into two parts: animals and plants. Of these two parts, Aristotle focused only on animals. The current botanical taxonomy actually originated in the work of Theophrastus, Aristotle's best student and successor, who worked, of course, from Aristotle's example and within his metaphysical system.

Aristotle's divisions of genera and species were based on both his metaphysical schema of the universe and observation. Grouping animals based on their habitats and bodily structures, Aristotle concluded there were two basic types of animal: those with (red) blood, and those without. These classifications line up fairly well with current categories of vertebrates and invertebrates. Of the blooded animals, there were five kinds: land mammals, birds, reptiles/amphibians, fish, and cetaceans (dolphins, porpoises, whales). Those that had no blood were divided as such: arthropods (insects and spiders), crustaceans, shellfish, soft animals such as octopuses and squid, and then plantlike animals such as corals and jellyfish.

Aristotle's biological taxonomy was fairly quickly adopted by everybody with any interest, partly because it was the only one in existence and partly because it was so detailed. Using habitat and body structure to classify these animals also meant that he had gathered much information on their habits, anatomy, reproduction, life cycles, sustenance gathering and feeding, rearing of young, and so on. With Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century AD bringing Aristotle's metaphysical hierarchy into the Roman Catholic Church, Aristotle's science became the official worldview of the Church, and thus of Western culture. Because of this adoption by the Church, Aristotle's taxonomy was immune to rejection or revision for hundreds of years--until the Church's power was weakened enough for science as it is now known to develop.

After the Renaissance was made possible by the decline in the Church's power, numerous biologists began expanding on Aristotle's taxonomy, but it was not until Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778) began to distinguish plants by their sexual parts that the taxonomic system used today began to take its more familiar shape. The age of exploration brought knowledge of previously unknown organisms that had to be classified. With this influx of data and the freedom to study it, biological taxonomy finally came into its own, but one can still see the influence of these men in the present taxonomic use of Aristotle's Greek and Linnaeus's Latin.

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