Who invented taxonomy and helped classify plants?

• A. Charles Darwin
• B. Carl Linnaeus
• C. Gregor Mendel
• D. Louis Pasteur

Answer: (B)

Taxonomy and plant classification were formalized by Carl Linnaeus. He created binomial nomenclature, the two-part Latin naming system, and organized living things into a nested hierarchy (genus, family, order, class, phylum, kingdom). For plants, his approach standardized how species were described and named, beginning with works like Species Plantarum in 1753, which laid the groundwork for consistent plant classification. While Darwin later reshaped ideas about relationships through evolution, Mendel illuminated inheritance, and Pasteur advanced microbiology, none of them founded the naming and classification framework itself. Linnaeus’s contribution is the foundation of how we name and categorize plants today.