Zoology

Zoology is the scientific study of animals: their classification, anatomy, physiology, behavior, evolution and distribution. Aristotle is traditionally credited as its founder. In Historia Animalium, composed in the fourth century BCE, he undertook the first systematic attempt to classify all known animal life, grouping creatures by shared traits such as the presence of blood and by habitat, a work the anatomist Richard Owen later said zoological science sprang from as if from full maturity. The field's modern scientific footing was laid by Carl Linnaeus, whose Systema Naturae, in its definitive tenth edition of 1758, introduced binomial nomenclature for animals; 1 January 1758 is fixed by international convention as the starting point of zoological nomenclature itself. Comparative anatomy and vertebrate paleontology were established as rigorous sub-disciplines in the early nineteenth century by Georges Cuvier, who used comparative anatomy of fossil and living bones to establish extinction as a scientific fact. Zoology's ancient descriptive tradition and its later systematic, professionalized form are usually treated as two distinct stages rather than one founding moment.