The prospects of integrating full-blown biological taxonomies into an ontological reasoning framework are reviewed. We contrast the common usage of a static 'snapshot' hierarchy in ontological ...

Reproduction, and thus information transfer across generations, is the most essential process of life, yet biologists lack a consensus on terms to define biological information. Unfortunately, ...

In laboratories around the world, brave new organisms are lustily brewing in warm liquid media. These microbes are invisible to the naked eye, but even under a microscope they seem unremarkable—a cell ...

It was under the last rock of the day, that scientists finally came face to antennae with the giant crayfish of Shoal Creek. Twice as big as its competitors, the hairy crayfish, which can grow to ...

Taxonomy, the science of identifying, describing and classifying life forms, is currently experiencing a technological revolution. As a result, the goal of collecting data on the Earth’s entire ...

Revisionary taxonomy is frequently dismissed as merely descriptive, which belies its strong intellectual content and hypothesis-driven nature. Funding for taxonomy is inadequate and largely diverted ...

WASHINGTON— In January 2025 a paper published in Current Biology (Ghezelayagh et al. 2025) explained that genetic analysis demonstrated that snail darters (Percina tanasi) represented a population of ...

WHEN Peter Camper, the great Dutch anatomist, was proposed for election as a foreign member of the Linnean-Society of London in 1788, he wrote refusing in very emphatic terms to be associated with a ...

A simple vocabulary for describing biological species and related taxa. The Wildlife ontology is a simple lightweight ontology for publishing data about all forms of biological taxa, including phyla, ...