Source: Carolus Linnaeus, Original painting by Alexander Roslin. Digitally improved by Greg L., Wikimedia Commons

Carolus Linnaeus developed the first system of naming organisms.

Linnaeus organized species into taxa that formed a hierarchy or set of ordered ranks. Linnaeus's original system had only four levels, but over time his classification system expanded into eight hierarchical taxa: species, genus, family, order, class, phylum, kingdom, and domain.

Watch the following video and learn more about taxonomic hierarchy.

Look at the diagram below. It shows the taxonomic hierarchy of the lion starting from kingdom to species.

Source: Domain Eukaryota, Windows to the Universe