in many universities, traditional departments (e.g. botany, zoology) were scrapped, and new broader departments like 'school of biological sciences' were formed. inside this umbrella, research and teaching teams were based on interdisciplinary problems, such as ecology or cell division or earth history. there are some necessary specialities which do not fit easily into the new system. examples are taxonomy (you still need people to identify animals) and areas like parasitology and agricultural botany.