Principles and Techniques of Contemporary Taxonomy

This volume in the Tertiary Level Biology series fills a gap in the taxonomic literature by providing a comprehensive survey of the arguments and techniques of systematics as they are applied today to all groups of organisms. It covers the principles of nomenclature and classification, the logic and practice of cladistics, and, in a series of chapters, considers the scope, application, benefits and drawbacks of a wide range of sources of phylogenetically informative character systems, from behaviour and morphology to DNA. There is an emphasis on modern aspects of the subject. This book should be of interest to taxonomists, biochemists and evolutionary biologists at advanced undergraduate and immediate postgraduate levels.