The three domains of life. Once, there were two, and now there are three - Bacteria, Eukaryote and the newest one, Archaea. All living organisms are placed into one of the three categories. The oldest is bacteria, which has been around since the dawn of time. The second is Eukaryote, which has been around for about 2 billion years, and the youngest being Archaea, which has been around for longer than discovered, in 1977.
Bacteria
Bacteria are single-celled organisms that have evolved through time to adapt to their environment.
Archaea
Archaea, while only being discovered fairly recently, are some of the oldest single-celled organisms alive. They often live in extreme environments.
Eukaryota
Multi-celled organisms makes up for around half of the known organisms that we have classified today. You are a eukaryote.
Kingdoms
There are five kingdoms that every organism is placed into. They include animalia, plantae, fungi, protista and bacteria.
Classification
The way we classify organisms hasn't changed much from when we started some 300 years ago. Also known as Taxonomy, it was first put together by Carl Linnaeus.
Carl Linnaeus
Carl Linnaeus was a Swedish naturist that decided it was right to name everything. Every living organism found since he created the rules of binomial nomenclature has been named in the same fashion.
Gregor Mendel
Considered the father of genetics, Gregor Mendel created the law of assortment through experiments with peas, noting that there are dominant and recessive genes.
Carl Woese
Carl Woese was an American scientist that discovered that bacteria weren't all the same, and that some acted differently, thus creating another domain called Archaea.
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