Carl Linnaeus. Caricature of the Swedish botanist and taxonomist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778). Linnaeus was a great classifier of living organisms. In 1735, he published Systema Naturae (The Natural World) in which he divided flowering plants into classes based on the plant sex organs. He is considered the founder of modern taxonomy and, in 1749, he introduced binomial nomenclature. This gave each plant a generic latin noun (genus), followed by a specific adjective (species). Linnaeus opposed evolutionary theory, believing that no new species had been formed since the Creation, and that none had become extinct.