Rod Page at iPhylo draws attention to a new paper in Systematic Biology (Costello et al 2011) estimating the total number of species. They come to a much lower figure than a previous paper (Camilo Mora et al 2011). Rod said something interesting that linked in to my thoughts on species numbers. “The fuss over…
Tag: species numbers
Species numbers
Christopher Taylor at the excellent Catalogue of Organisms has a thought provoking post on the taxonomic diversity of described species. He has a picture of animal groups, plants and fungi scaled by number of described species. I like these sorts of pictures; they are great for shocking undergraduates who have never really thought about the…