In the mid 90's there was a murder inquiry somewhere down south, they had a susspect but could not find any hard evidence to place this person at the scene.... then after a local detective went to the suspects house for some reason or another they came across his truck....in the back was a broken branch from an oak tree a Holm oak, Quercus ilex..... Now not knowing much about trees or plant life the detective went to the murder scene to see what he could find,....few hours later he had come across (what he thought was the same tree as the branch he had found....he called for forensic detectives to see what they could put together.
The forensic team had discovered that the tree was infact a holm oak, or a mediterainen oak, or a holly oak or evergreen oak and many more names......But the latin name quercus ilex put all these names in to one box.
However...this was still not enough evidence, Yeah sure they had a branch in his truck from a spieces of tree that just so happen to be at the murder scene but after some reseach from local tree officers there just so happened to be 45 more quercus ilex in the sourounding area....
so back to the drawing board it was....or not for the detective who thought that the tree was still the answer....if in someway he could prove that this branch was from the same tree as the one from the murder scene... so he decided to go back to the forensic team with a theory.......
he wanted to know if there was anychance that a tree had a totally Unique dna strand like everything else on this planet...so they set out and got samples from all the other quercus ilex in the area and started the reseach.......
the results where asstonishing, There were identified over 45,000 protein-coding genes, more than any other organism sequenced to date, approximately twice as many as present in the human genome. and they also match the branch with the tree from the murder scene....(case closed)
there was no paticuluar reason for me writing this story only to share with those that did not know about trees having dna, as for latin names there will come a time when the names are usefull so not lerning them is not going to be detremental to your climbing or understanding of how the tree timber your working on reacts different at different times of the year.....nor will it affect you getting a job and/or pricing work up but it does help and it makes things simple only for those who know what your talking about.....
unlike me i have know idea what i'm talking about i was just trying to place my order from tescos and ended up here....