Latin, as mentioned, is the lingua franca for scientific publications in Early Modern Europe. Much of this is derived from botany, and in Phytopinax and more explicitly Pinax theatri botanici the French-Swiss botanist Caspar Bauhin anticipates Linnean binomial nomenclature. Bauhin's names, however, were purely descriptive, borrowed from other authors but not unique. As a result some of these names grow quite long, but the notion of naming animals in Latin generally derives at its base from, unsurprisingly, antiquity.

Aristotle's On the Parts of Animals (De Partibus Animalium) and Theophrastus' Historia Plantarum are the chief texts used by naturalists before Linnaeus. Rivinus refined Bauhin's system in Introductio Universalis in Rem Herbarium, and explicitly advocated for binomial nomenclature. Andrea Cesalpino's De Plantis makes similar efforts, but the consistency of these schemes is not rigidly set until Linnaeus.

The contemporary system of naming animals the way we do - Danio rerio, Drosophila melanogaster, Fundulus heteroclitus as Genus species was proposed (and ultimately adopted as a result) by Linnaeus in in Systema Naturae in 1735 and revised throughout the 18th century. Linnaeus certainly drew on his predecessors but his taxonomic structure was unique in the structure and standardization.