Dichotomous key

A Dichotomous key is a tool used for identification of a group of unknown organisms. It takes a basic understanding of the naming scheme of the morphology of the species.

Dichotomous roughly translates to “two-way-split” meaning to identify an organism to species level, a series of questions regarding the morphology of the organism is posed, and each question has two possible outcomes; e.g. “Does the specimen have five fingers on each hand?” - answer A) yes, answer B) other; each answer will then open a new set of questions until the species has been identified. To correctly use this tool it is important to have complete specimens - imagine if the hand being identified had lost a finger - then the user would arrive at a wrong species.