Solution to our Spanish travel ‘case’

WHEN the Swedish genius Carl Linnaeus published the first skimpy edition of Systema Naturae in 1735 he revolutionised the way we look at and describe the natural world.

His system of binomial nomenclature, giving every living thing a genus and a species in a universal language, imposed order and also meant that we knew who we were — Homo sapiens.

A surprising number of the names that Linnaeus gave to species still stand today and so do the relationships between species that he arrived at. But up until about 50 years ago the classification of living things was largely dependent on visual clues.