User:Smildmo/Domain (biology)

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Carolus Linnaeus made the classification of domain popular in the famous taxonomy system he created in the middle of the eighteenth century. This system was further improved by the studies of Charles Darwin later on but failed to properly classify the domain, bacteria, due to it having very few observable features to compare to the other domains. Carl Woese made a revolutionary breakthrough when, in 1977, he compared the nucleotide sequences of the 16s ribosomal RNA and discovered that the rank, domain, contained three branches; not two like scientists had previously thought. Initially, due to their physical similarities, archaea and bacteria were classified together and called "archaebacteria". However, scientists now know that these two domains are hardly similar and are internally wildly different.