I understand that both kingdoms represent primitive eukaryotic organisms, and both contain both unicellular and multicellular organisms.
What are the points that distinguish one kingdom from the other?
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First, just a correction: it's "Protista" and "Protoctista", not "Protistae" and "Protoctistae".
They mean the same thing. Those are just different names proposed by different taxonomists for describing the same group of organisms.
- Protoctista (or Primigenum) was proposed by John Hogg in 1860.
- Protista was proposed by Ernst Haeckel in 1866.
However, as it is common in taxonomy and nomenclature in general, things sometimes get a bit more complicated: some biologists, like Lynn Margulis, don't treat those two terms as synonyms. Particularly, I don't use her nomenclature.
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