What are the five kingdoms presently used to categorize living things?
Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778) in 1735 devised a classification system that divided all living organisms into two kingdoms: plants and animals. Linnaeus’s method was based on similarities and differences between organisms. Soon thereafter it was determined that fungi do not really belong in either the plant or animal kingdom. Although fungi were first thought to be plants, it turns out that they have no chlorophyll, roots, stems, or leaves, and hardly resemble any true plant. While fungi share some characteristics with plants, they share other characteristics with animals. Moreover, fungi have a number of features that are different from those of any known plant or animal species. For these reasons, fungi became the third kingdom. In 1959, R. H. Whittaker proposed the current five-kingdom system, based on…
