The World of Birds
A short account of how bird species are classified
How do birds fit into the study of all living things, and how are they classified?
The standard method for classifying living things is to group them together into categories that define them according to features that they share and which set them apart from other categories. This method gives rise to an increasingly detailed set of categories that have been given standard names, although these are not universally agreed and changes to them have been made at various times.
According to one commonly agreed method, birds belong to the kingdom of animals, the phylum of chordata (animals having spinal cords) and the subphylum of vertebrata (animals with backbones).
They then form their own class, namely that of aves. A special subclass has been assigned to Archaeopteryx, the long-extinct feathered reptile that has been thought to be the earliest bird (although this is disputed), which leaves all other birds in the subclass of neornithes.
The bird world is then split into about 30 groups that are designated as orders, and these are further divided into a total of around 200 families. Further divisions are into genus and species, of which there are around 10,000.