Taxonomy is a branch of science that has to do with the classifications of organisms. Taxonomists is the term that is used when referring to a scientist that works with taxonomy. There are two main purposes for why taxonomy is used to classify organisms.
1) to identify organisms (example, Canis - dog and felis- cat)
2) to provide a very basic set of groups to recognize different species.
The following picture is the classification of a large cat. (Hopefully this explains a little bit more!)
What is binomial nomenclature?
A term invented by Linnaeus, it was created to be the formal system of naming all living organisms. Each naming has two parts, the genus name and the species name. Every name is based on latin, or modernized latin. An example of binomial nomenclature would be Southern flying squirrels, or scientifically known as the glaucomys volans, which is part of the sciuridae family. Small to medium sized rodents are part of Sciuridae family, which includes tree squirrels, ground squirels, chipmunks etc.
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