Taxonomy (biology) new common (or apomorphic) traits. However, certain phenetic methods, such as neighbor joining, have found their way into cladistics, as a reasonable approximation of phylogeny when more advanced methods (such as Bayesian inference) are too computationally expensive. Modern taxonomy uses database technologies to search and catalogue classifications and their documentation. While there is no commonly used database, there are comprehensive databases such as the "Catalogue of Life", which attempts to list every documented species. The catalogue listed 1.64 million species for all kingdoms as of April 2016, claiming coverage of more than three quarters of the estimated species known to
Taxonomy (biology) modern science. Taxonomy (biology) Taxonomy () is the science of defining and naming groups of biological organisms on the basis of shared characteristics. Organisms are grouped together into taxa (singular: taxon) and these groups are given a taxonomic rank; groups of a given rank can be aggregated to form a super-group of higher rank, thus creating a taxonomic hierarchy. The principal ranks in modern use are domain, kingdom, phylum (division is sometimes used in botany in place of phylum), class, order, family, genus and species. The Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus is regarded as the father of taxonomy, as he developed