In botany, flora (plural: floras or florae) has two meanings: a flora (with a lower case 'f') refers to the plant life occurring in a particular region, generally the naturally occurring or indigenous plant life, while a Flora (with a capital 'F') refers to a book or other work describing a flora and including aids for the identification of the plants it contains such as botanical keys and line drawings that illustrate the characters that distinguish the different plants. Floristics is the study of floras, including the preparation of Floras.
The term flora comes from Latin languageFlora, the goddess of flowers in Roman mythology. The corresponding term for animallife is fauna. Flora, fauna and other forms oflife such as fungi are collectively referred to asbiota.
Zoologists andpaleontologists use fauna to refer to a typical collection of animals found in a specific time or place, e.g. the "Sonoran Desert fauna" or the "Burgess shale fauna".
Paleontologists sometimes refer to a sequence of faunal stages, which is a series of rocks all containing similar fossils.
The name comes from Fauna, a Roman fertility and earth goddess, the Roman god Faunus, and the related forest spirits called Fauns. All three words are cognates of the name of the Greek godPan, and panis is the Greek equivalent of fauna. Fauna is also the word for a book that catalogues the animals in such a manner. The term was first used by Linnaeus in the title of his 1747 work Fauna Suecica.
