Latin names?

Question

Can someone answer these two questions for me?

Why are latin names useful:
1.) for scientists in different countries discussing their work?
2.) when we want to know which animals are related?

Answer 1

1. latin is sort of the common scientific language, especially in the biological sciences. so if they're discussing discovery or a certain genus and species, since there are different vernacular names for certain animals, this eliminates some confusion.
2. most animals are named using latin genus and species names (i.e. a dog is "canis familiaris"). so if the genus name is the same, you know they are related. for example, we know that a wolf is related to a dog, right? the scientific name for a wolf is "canis rufus"

Answer 2

1) Because in different countries an "elephant" might not be called an "elephant" but the scientific name is universal.
2) The scientific name lets us know what genous and species the animal belongs to.

Answer 3

Suppose I study Red-tailed Hawks and their close relatives in the United States (these are hawks in the genus Buteo; broad-winged and fan-tailed soaring hawks). I go to a conference in England where I meet someone who says he studies Buzzards like I do. "No!" I say, "I don't care about Turkey Vultures, just Buteo hawks." "Who said anything about Vultures?" he says - I was talking about Buzzards." The problem is, in England, Buteos are known by the common term Buzzard, while in the United States, Buzzard is commonly used as a term for Vulture. Very different birds. This sort of thing happens all the time with scientists all over. That's why old Karl Linne figured it would be a good idea to make a standardized naming structure so that everyone would use the same 'science name' for the same thing, regardless of what its common names might be.
As for relatedness, think about how classification is set up: you group things together based on how they are related, then separate them into tighter and tighter groups that are more and more closely related. Let's use people as an example, and make up our own classification system. All people are people, but all people are different from elephants, so we'll say that there are 2 Kingdoms - Peoplalia and Elephantalia. Now we ignore elephants and concentrate on people. Obviously there are different groups of people. We'll separate people into groups depending on what 'continent' they live, so each person will be in a particular Phylum: Africana, Asiatica, Europa, Namerica, Samerica, Anzaca, and Oceanica. In Europe, as an example, people live in different regions, so we'll separate our Phylum Europa into Classes such as Germania, Englandia, Frances, etc. In each Class (Germania, for example), people will be separated into Orders, depending on where they live, so you would have Orders like Bavaria, Saxony, Prussia, etc. (similar to states or counties within a nation). Then we break down each Order into more closely related groups, such as those who live in the same city - we'll call this classification Family, and it will include groups such as Bonn, Berlin, Munich, etc. Within each city we have people living in neighborhoods, and we'll group people in each neighborhood together under the classification level Genus, and then separate the people in each Genus by the street they live on; the people who all live on the same street will all be in the same Species. So now we can classify everybody in the world by Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus and Species, and it will tell us how they're related (where they live) and how they're different from other people in different groups. Hans and Franz, who live on the same stretch of street in Nuremburg are more closely 'related' to each other than either is to Heinrich, who lives in Bonn. All of them are more closely related to each other than Francois is, who lives in Marseilles, in France. The four of them, though, are more closely related to each other under our classification system, than any of them is to Bruce, who lives in Australia, in the Phylum Anzaca. See how it goes? By looking at where two things fall into the same group we can determine how closely they are related - two things that are in the same Genus are much more closely related than two things that are in the same Kingdom, but in different Phyla.