In the fifteenth century and in new lands, Europeans discovered a new diversity of plants and animals. This did not immediately influence overall classification, as they erroneously placed completely new animal types into old, existing categories. There were vague beginnings of a modern classification hierarchy, with a clear recognition of Species, Genus and Order, and dim recognition of Family and Class. As cheap printed texts began to be produced and dispersed widely, knowledge based on ancient classics blended with new knowledge and more people could gain a view of biodiversity in faraway countries. The outlook on diversity blended the discovery of new animals with the belief in fantastic creatures and with the belief that terrestrial animals have marine counterparts. A major Renaissance innovation was the collection of natural history objects that one could inspect and study in the future. Such collections eventually became museums, which were to exist far beyond the collector’s life and enable improved future study of animal diversity. Renaissance naturalists did not conduct intensive studies of animal behaviour, but they were aware of satellite copulation, whereby a non-dominant male on the periphery of a dominant male’s territory sneaks up to copulate with a female in the latter’s harem. During the early and mid-Renaissance, people followed ancient texts that viewed plant diversity in medical contexts. Universities began teaching medicinal plants, undertook plant-collecting excursions, planted botanical gardens, maintained herbaria and wrote herbals. Much of the herbal knowledge was eventually channelled into one book in which, in frequently updated editions, first came uncritical acceptance of ancient texts; then critical appraisal and finally additional, original observations. Botany, as a discipline independent of pharmacology, may have first emerged when, in the late Renaissance, Cesalpino established a classification of plant diversity based on essential features of the plant, not on medicinal value. His essential, defining functions of plants were dictated by the vegetative soul, which is typified by nutrition (= growth) and reproduction. The medulla performs nutrition, so he divided all plants into those with a hard, woody medulla (trees and shrubs; they live many years and bear fruit) and those with a soft, fleshy one (herbs; they die after seed formation). These two groups are divided further by their fruit, which has three essential features: number, location and shape. He subdivided his two groups by the floral organs’ position on the seed case, number of seeds in the fruit and number of compartments per fruit. During the Renaissance, a “fossil” was any hard object dug up from the ground. Intellectuals believed that fossil shells inside rocks had never been living beings. They formed by an incomplete process of spontaneous generation, inside stones. Naturalists classified fossil diversity into absurd groups, of sea urchins resembling serpents, sea lilies resembling stars and belemnites resembling human artefacts. Plato’s philosophy, that objects in the world are imperfect expressions of eternal, perfect ideas, supported the view that animal-resembling fossils are not animals. Some believed that fossil ‘seashells’ form according to male (sulphur) and female (mercury) principles, sulphur because of its power, heat and activity; and mercury because it is cold, passive and flows, taking the form of active powers. The sulphur principle dictates the shape, and the mercury principle supplies matter. Intellectuals classified mineral diversity within this ideological frame. In metals, sulphur and mercury combine in varying proportions and levels of purity. In imperfect minerals, the contribution of sulphur or mercury weakens, because a salt principle mixes in. In sedimentary, fossils containing rocks, sulphur, mercury and salt principles mix with “fluores”. Fossils are, therefore, inorganic minerals, whatever their resemblance to animals. They grow within enclosing rocks, as during pregnancy. During the Renaissance, some people viewed the universe as a series of spheres (“worlds”), one enveloping the other. The upper world, of pure eternal spirituality, consists of angels. The middle world, of eternal spirituality, mixed with eternal matter, consists of stars. The Sun is at the centre of the world of stars, at the mid-point between spirituality and materialism, between God and Man. It is the residence of the Holy Spirit, and the spirit of life emanates from it. The underworld consists of temporary matter with little spiritual essence. Entities of these materials may change, from one species to another, and they decay over time. Spheres of animals, plants and minerals surround the Earth, which consists of the earth and water elements. Man-the-Creator, in the sphere of animals, imitates God’s creation by creating things himself, such as agriculture and machines. The male takes the right side of the sun. His animals include a lion, snake and dolphin; his plants are mainly trees, and his minerals are gold and lead. The female takes the left side of the moon. Her animals are eagle, snail and fish, her plants are wheat, flowers and roots, and her metals are silver and copper. The male-female division is thus an essential feature of the underworld. Anatomy, more than other branches of biology, at first sought to glorify and restore Greek and Roman observations; later to break away from them; and finally, to develop original views. Early in the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci illustrated conventional viewpoints, gleaned from classic and medieval texts. Assuming that the human body and that of many animals are identical, he formed a distorted illustration of male and female human genitalia, “planted” structures of animal organs also elsewhere in the human body and believed that the male organ possessed some individuality, independent of the body. Vesalius, in the mid-Renaissance, based human anatomy on his own dissections and observations, not on texts, and he accurately illustrated the human genitalia. Though noting many errors in classic literature, he too erred in assigning animal structures to human anatomy; consequently, his observations were not always accurate. By insisting on detailed, accurate nomenclature for every structure, he advanced anatomy as a discipline. Late in the Renaissance, Casserio compared vocal and hearing organs in humans, dogs, cows, birds, amphibians, fish and insects and produced one of the first deliberate studies in comparative anatomy. During the late Renaissance, the study of human and animal anatomy began drifting apart.