  Taylor's power law is one of the mostly widely known empirical patterns in
ecology discovered in the 20th century. It states that the variance of species
population density scales as a power-law function of the mean population
density. Taylor's power law was named after the British ecologist Lionel Roy
Taylor. During the past half-century, Taylor's power law was confirmed for
thousands of biological species and even for non-biological quantities.
Numerous theories and models have been proposed to explain the mechanisms of
Taylor's power law. However an understanding of the historical origin of this
ubiquitous scaling pattern is lacking. This work reviews two research aspects
that are fundamental to the discovery of Taylor's power law and provides an
outlook of its future studies.
