Unless otherwise noted,
the material on this page may be used under the terms of a
Creative Commons License.
| The Linnaean System | ||
| Systematics | Tribe |
| Systematics | Taxonomy |
| Kingdom Phylum Class Order Family Genus Species |
In the Linnaean system (and taxonomic systems based on it), the Tribe is an optional ranking between the Family and the Genus. It might seem strange that a family is considered higher than a tribe (i.e. a family can contain many tribes, but not vice versa), such is the way these names are. This category has traditionally been more commonly used in botany, but cladistics, with its ever finer subdividing of phylogenetic trees, is encouraging a greater use of this ranking in zoology and paleontology as well. Basically we could say that a tribe is a group of organisms among which the differences are extremely minor but still noticeable. In other words a group of genera which are more closely related to each other than to other genera in that family. |
| rank | suffix |
| Tribe | - ini |
| Subtribe | -ina |