In 

biology, a kingdom (Latin: regnum, plural regna) is the second highest taxonomic rank, just

below domain. Kingdoms are divided into smaller groups called phyla. Traditionally, some textbooks
from the United States and Canada used a system of six
kingdoms (Animalia, Plantae, Fungi, Protista, Archaea/Archaebacteria, and Bacteria/Eubacteria)
while textbooks in Great Britain, India, Greece, Brazil and other countries use five kingdoms
only (Animalia, Plantae, Fungi, Protista and Monera). Some recent classifications based on
modern cladistics have explicitly abandoned the term kingdom, noting that some traditional
kingdoms are not monophyletic, meaning that they do not consist of all the descendants of a
common ancestor. The terms flora (for plants), fauna (for animals), and, in the 21st
century, funga (for fungi) are also used for life present in a particular region or time.[

When Carl Linnaeus introduced the rank-based system of nomenclature into biology in 1735, the

highest rank was given the name "kingdom" and was followed by four other main or principal
ranks: class, order, genus and species.[3] Later two further main ranks were introduced, making the
sequence kingdom, phylum or division, class, order, family, genus and species.[4] In 1990, the rank
of domain was introduced above kingdom.[5]
Prefixes can be added so subkingdom (subregnum) and infrakingdom (also known as infraregnum)
are the two ranks immediately below kingdom. Superkingdom may be considered as an equivalent
of domain or empire or as an independent rank between kingdom and domain or subdomain. In
some classification systems the additional rank branch (Latin: ramus) can be inserted between
subkingdom and infrakingdom, e.g., Protostomia and Deuterostomia in the classification of Cavalier-
Smith.[6]

History[edit]
Two kingdoms of life[edit]
The classification of living things into animals and plants is an ancient one. Aristotle (384–322 BC)
classified animal species in his History of Animals, while his pupil Theophrastus (c. 371–c. 287 BC)
wrote a parallel work, the Historia Plantarum, on plants.[7]
Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) laid the foundations for modern biological nomenclature, now regulated
by the Nomenclature Codes, in 1735. He distinguished two kingdoms of living things: Regnum
Animale ('animal kingdom') and Regnum Vegetabile ('vegetable kingdom', for plants). Linnaeus also
included minerals in his classification system, placing them in a third kingdom, Regnum Lapideum.

Three kingdoms of life[edit]

Haeckel's original (1866) conception of the three kingdoms of life, including the new kingdom Protista. Notice
the inclusion of the cyanobacterium Nostoc with plants.

In 1674, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, often called the "father of microscopy", sent the Royal
Society of London a copy of his first observations of microscopic single-celled organisms. Until then,
the existence of such microscopic organisms was entirely unknown. Despite this, Linnaeus did not
include any microscopic creatures in his original taxonomy.
At first, microscopic organisms were classified within the animal and plant kingdoms. However, by
the mid–19th century, it had become clear to many that "the existing dichotomy of the plant and
animal kingdoms [had become] rapidly blurred at its boundaries and outmoded".[8]
In 1860 John Hogg proposed the Protoctista, a third kingdom of life composed of “all the lower
creatures, or the primary organic beings"; he retained Regnum Lapideum as a fourth kingdom of
minerals.[8] In 1866, Ernst Haeckel also proposed a third kingdom of life, the Protista, for "neutral
organisms" or "the kingdom of primitive forms", which were neither animal nor plant; he did not
include the Regnum Lapideum in his scheme.[8] Haeckel revised the content of this kingdom a
number of times before settling on a division based on whether organisms were unicellular (Protista)
or multicellular (animals and plants).
Haeckel's original (1866) conception of the three kingdoms of life, including the new kingdom Protista. Notice
the inclusion of the cyanobacterium Nostoc with plants

Four kingdoms[edit]
The development of microscopy revealed important distinctions between those organisms whose
cells do not have a distinct nucleus (prokaryotes) and organisms whose cells do have a distinct
nucleus (eukaryotes). In 1937 Édouard Chatton introduced the terms "prokaryote" and "eukaryote" to
differentiate these organisms.[9]
In 1938, Herbert F. Copeland proposed a four-kingdom classification by creating the novel
Kingdom Monera of prokaryotic organisms; as a revised phylum Monera of the Protista, it included
organisms now classified as Bacteria and Archaea. Ernst Haeckel, in his 1904 book The Wonders of
Life, had placed the blue-green algae (or Phycochromacea) in Monera; this would gradually gain
acceptance, and the blue-green algae would become classified as bacteria in the
phylum Cyanobacteria.[8][9]
In the 1960s, Roger Stanier and C. B. van Niel promoted and popularized Édouard Chatton's earlier
work, particularly in their paper of 1962, "The Concept of a Bacterium"; this created, for the first time,
a rank above kingdom—a superkingdom or empire—with the two-empire system of prokaryotes and
eukaryotes.[9] The two-empire system would later be expanded to the three-domain system of
Archaea, Bacteria, and Eukaryota
Five kingdoms[edit]
The differences between fungi and other organisms regarded as plants had long been recognised by
some; Haeckel had moved the fungi out of Plantae into Protista after his original classification,[8] but
was largely ignored in this separation by scientists of his time. Robert Whittaker recognized an
additional kingdom for the Fungi. The resulting five-kingdom system, proposed in 1969 by Whittaker,
has become a popular standard and with some refinement is still used in many works and forms the
basis for new multi-kingdom systems. It is based mainly upon differences in nutrition; his Plantae
were mostly multicellular autotrophs, his Animalia multicellular heterotrophs, and his Fungi
multicellular saprotrophs.- (Feeding on decaying organisms)
The remaining two kingdoms, Protista and Monera, included unicellular and simple cellular colonies.
[11]
 The five kingdom system may be combined with the two empire system. In the Whittaker system,
Plantae included some algae. In other systems, such as Lynn Margulis's system of five kingdoms,
the plants included just the land plants (Embryophyta), and Protoctista has a broader definition.[12]
Following publication of Whittaker's system, the five-kingdom model began to be commonly used in
high school biology textbooks.[13] But despite the development from two kingdoms to five among most
scientists, some authors as late as 1975 continued to employ a traditional two-kingdom system of
animals and plants, dividing the plant kingdom into subkingdoms Prokaryota (bacteria and
cyanobacteria), Mycota (fungi and supposed relatives), and Chlorota (algae and land plants).

Six kingdoms[edit]
In 1977, Carl Woese and colleagues proposed the fundamental subdivision of the prokaryotes into
the Eubacteria (later called the Bacteria) and Archaebacteria (later called the Archaea), based
on ribosomal RNA structure;[15] this would later lead to the proposal of three "domains" of life, of
Bacteria, Archaea, and Eukaryota.[5] Combined with the five-kingdom model, this created a six-
kingdom model, where the kingdom Monera is replaced by the kingdoms Bacteria and Archaea.
[16]
 This six-kingdom model is commonly used in recent US high school biology textbooks, but has
received criticism for compromising the current scientific consensus.[13] But the division of
prokaryotes into two kingdoms remains in use with the recent seven kingdoms scheme of Thomas
Cavalier-Smith, although it primarily differs in that Protista is replaced by Protozoa and Chromista.[17]
Eight kingdoms[edit]
Thomas Cavalier-Smith supported the consensus at that time, that the difference
between Eubacteria and Archaebacteria was so great (particularly considering the genetic distance
of ribosomal genes) that the prokaryotes needed to be separated into two different kingdoms. He
then divided Eubacteria into two subkingdoms: Negibacteria (Gram negative bacteria)
and Posibacteria (Gram positive bacteria). Technological advances in electron microscopy allowed
the separation of the Chromista from the Plantae kingdom. Indeed, the chloroplast of the chromists
is located in the lumen of the endoplasmic reticulum instead of in the cytosol. Moreover, only
chromists contain chlorophyll c. Since then, many non-photosynthetic phyla of protists, thought to
have secondarily lost their chloroplasts, were integrated into the kingdom Chromista.
Finally, some protists lacking mitochondria were discovered.[18] As mitochondria were known to be
the result of the endosymbiosis of a proteobacterium, it was thought that these amitochondriate
eukaryotes were primitively so, marking an important step in eukaryogenesis. As a result, these
amitochondriate protists were separated from the protist kingdom, giving rise to the, at the same
time, superkingdom and kingdom Archezoa. This superkingdom was opposed to
the Metakaryota superkingdom, grouping together the five other eukaryotic kingdoms
(Animalia, Protozoa, Fungi, Plantae and Chromista). This was known as the Archezoa hypothesis,
which has since been abandoned;[19] later schemes did not include the Archezoa–Metakaryota divide

‡ No longer recognized by taxonomists.

Six kingdoms (1998)[edit]

In 1998, Cavalier-Smith published a six-kingdom model,[6] which has been revised in subsequent
papers. The version published in 2009 is shown below.[20][a][21] Cavalier-Smith no longer accepted the
importance of the fundamental Eubacteria–Archaebacteria divide put forward by Woese and others
and supported by recent research.[22] The kingdom Bacteria (sole kingdom of empire Prokaryota) was
subdivided into two sub-kingdoms according to their membrane
topologies: Unibacteria and Negibacteria. Unibacteria was divided into
phyla Archaebacteria and Posibacteria; the bimembranous-unimembranous transition was thought
to be far more fundamental than the long branch of genetic distance of Archaebacteria, viewed as
having no particular biological significance.
Cavalier-Smith does not accept the requirement for taxa to be monophyletic ("holophyletic" in his
terminology) to be valid. He defines Prokaryota, Bacteria, Negibacteria, Unibacteria, and
Posibacteria as valid paraphyla (therefore "monophyletic" in the sense he uses this term) taxa,
marking important innovations of biological significance (in regard of the concept of biological niche).
In the same way, his paraphyletic kingdom Protozoa includes the ancestors of Animalia, Fungi,
Plantae, and Chromista. The advances of phylogenetic studies allowed Cavalier-Smith to realize that
all the phyla thought to be archezoans (i.e. primitively amitochondriate eukaryotes) had in fact
secondarily lost their mitochondria, typically by transforming them into new
organelles: Hydrogenosomes. This means that all living eukaryotes are in fact metakaryotes,
according to the significance of the term given by Cavalier-Smith. Some of the members of the
defunct kingdom Archezoa, like the phylum Microsporidia, were reclassified into kingdom Fungi.
Others were reclassified in kingdom Protozoa, like Metamonada which is now part of
infrakingdom Excavata.
 Because Cavalier-Smith allows paraphyly, the diagram below is an 'organization chart', not an
'ancestor chart', and does not represent an evolutionary tree.

Seven kingdoms[edit]
Cavalier-Smith and his collaborators revised their classification in 2015. In this scheme they
introduced two superkingdoms of Prokaryota and Eukaryota and seven kingdoms. Prokaryota have
two kingdoms: Bacteria and Archaea. (This was based on the consensus in the Taxonomic Outline
of Bacteria and Archaea, and the Catalogue of Life). The Eukaryota have five kingdoms: Protozoa,
Chromista, Plantae, Fungi, and Animalia. In this classification a protist is any of the
eukaryotic unicellular organisms.

Woese e Cavalier- Cavalier- Ruggiero 

Linnaeus Haeckel Chatton Copeland Whittaker Woese et al.
t al. Smith Smith et al.
1735 1866 1925 1938 1969 1977
1990 1993 1998 2015
2
3 3
— — 2 empires 2 empires 2 empires 2 empires 2 empires superkingd
domains superkingdoms
oms
2 3 4 5 6
— 6 kingdoms — 8 kingdoms 7 kingdoms
kingdoms kingdoms kingdoms kingdoms kingdoms
Eubacteria Bacteria Eubacteria Bacteria
Prokaryota Monera Monera Archaebacteri Bacteria
Archaea Archaebacteria Archaea
a
— Protista
Archezoa
Protozoa Protozoa
Protista Protista Protista Protozoa
Chromista Chromista Chromista
Eukaryota Eucarya
Vegetabili Plantae Plantae Plantae Plantae Plantae
Plantae Plantae
a Fungi Fungi Fungi Fungi Fungi
Animalia Animalia Animalia Animalia Animalia Animalia Animalia Animalia

The kingdom-level classification of life is still widely employed as a useful way of grouping
organisms, notwithstanding some problems with this approach:
  Kingdoms such as Protozoa represent grades rather than clades, and so are rejected
by phylogenetic classification systems.
 The most recent research does not support the classification of the eukaryotes into any
of the standard systems. As of April 2010, no set of kingdoms is sufficiently supported by
research to attain widespread acceptance. In 2009, Andrew Roger and Alastair Simpson
emphasized the need for diligence in analyzing new discoveries: "With the current pace
of change in our understanding of the eukaryote tree of life, we should proceed with
caution."[40]

The 6 Kingdom of Life

Organisms are placed into these categories based on similarities or common
characteristics. Some of the characteristics that are used to determine placement
are cell type, nutrient acquisition, and reproduction. The two main cell types
are prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells.
Common types of nutrient acquisition include photosynthesis, absorption, and
ingestion. Types of reproduction include asexual reproduction and sexual
reproduction.

Some more modern classifications abandon the term "kingdom." These

classifications are based on cladistics, which notes that kingdoms in the
traditional sense are not monophyletic; that is, they do not all have a common
ancestor.

First Two Kingdoms

• The first two kingdoms involve bacteria. Scientists at one time grouped
bacteria into one kingdom but just recently divided them into two groups:
Archaebacteria and Eubacteria

• Both groups of bacteria are prokaryotes and unicellular

1. Archaebacteria
In 1983, scientists tool samples from a spot deep in the Pacific
Ocean where hot gases and molten rock boiled into the ocean form
the Earth’s interior.  To their surprise they discovered
unicellular (one cell) organisms in the samples. These organisms
are today classified in the kingdom, Archaebacteria.

Archaebacteria are found in extreme environments

such as hot boiling water and thermal vents under
conditions with no oxygen or highly acid environments.
• Archaebacteria is also called ancient bacteria as they date back 4
billion years
 • They are found in harsh environments that no other organism lives.
We call them “heat-loving” or “salt-loving” or “Methane-loving”

2. Eubacteria-It is the eubacteria that most people are talking about when
they say bacteria, because they live in more normal conditions like the
human body or pond water.

Like archaebacteria, eubacteria are complex and single

celled.  Most bacteria are in the EUBACTERIA kingdom. They
are the kinds found everywhere and are the ones people are most
familiar with. 

Eubacteria are classified in their own kingdom because their

chemical makeup is different. 

3. Protists
Slime molds and algae are protists.
Sometimes they are called the odds and ends kingdom because its
members are so different from one another.  Protists include all
microscopic organisms that are not bacteria, not animals, not plants
and not fungi. 
 
Most protists are unicellular. You may be wondering why those protists
are not classified in the Archaebacteria or Eubacteria kingdoms. 
 
It is because, unlike bacteria, protists are complex cells.

 Tuberculosis (TB) is a bacterial infection spread through inhaling tiny

droplets from the coughs or sneezes of an infected person. It mainly
affects the lungs, but it can affect any part of the body, including the tummy
(abdomen), glands, bones and nervous system.

 Diphtheria is a serious infection caused by strains of bacteria called

Corynebacterium diphtheriae that make toxin (poison). It can lead to
difficulty breathing, heart failure, paralysis, and even death.
 • Malaria

• Malaria kills about one million people every year!

4. Fungi
• Mushrooms, mold and mildew are all examples of organisms in the
kingdom fungi. 

• Most fungi are multicellular and consists of many complex cells. 

• Some fungi taste great and others can kill you!

• Fungi are organisms that biologists once confused with

plants, however, unlike plants, fungi cannot make their own
food.   Most obtain their food from parts of plants that are
decaying in the soil.

5. Plants
You are probably quite familiar with the members of this kingdom
as it contains all the plants that you have come to know
- flowering plants, mosses, and ferns.  Plants are
all multicellular and consist of complex cells.

With over 250,000 species, the plant kingdom is the second largest
kingdom.  Plant species range from the tiny green mosses to giant trees.

In addition plants are autotrophs, organisms that make their own

food.
Without plants, life on Earth would not exist!  Plants feed almost all
the heterotrophs (organisms that eat other organisms) on
Earth.  Wow!
 
6. Animals
The animal kingdom is the largest kingdom with over 1 million known
species.
All animals consist of many complex cells. They are also heterotrophs. 
 
Members of the animal kingdom are found in the most diverse
environments in the world.

REFERENCE

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_(biology)