Ordo naturalis

In botany, the phrase ordo naturalis, "natural order", was once used for what today is a family. Its origins lie with Carolus Linnaeus who used the word when he referred to natural groups of plants in his lesser-known work, particularly Philosophia Botanica. In his more famous works the Systema Naturae and the Species Plantarum, plants were arranged according to his artificial "Sexual system", and Linnaeus used the word "ordo" for an artificial unit. In those works, only genera and species (sometimes varieties) were "real" taxa.

In nineteenth-century works such as the Prodromus of de Candolle and the Genera Plantarum of Bentham & Hooker, the word ordo did indicate taxa that are now given the rank of family. Contemporary French works used the word "famille" for these same taxa. In the first international Rules of botanical nomenclature of 1906 the word family (familia) was assigned to this rank, while the term "order" (ordo) was reserved for a higher rank, for what in the nineteenth century had often been named a cohors (plural cohortes).

Naturalis Biodiversity Center

Naturalis Biodiversity Center is a national museum of natural history and a research center on biodiversity in Leiden, Netherlands.

History

Naturalis originated from the merger of the Rijksmuseum van Natuurlijke Historie (abbreviated RMNH) and the Rijksmuseum van Geologie en Mineralogie (abbreviated RGM) in 1984. In 1986 it was decided that the museum had to become the national public natural history museum and a new building was built. The new building cost about €60 million, making it the second most expensive museum building in the Netherlands.

Collection

The current museum is known for the numerous objects in its collections. Prior to the merger with the Zoölogisch Museum Amsterdam and National Herbarium of the Netherlands, there were approximately 10 million zoological and geological specimens in the Naturalis collection.