Biodiversity

Conserving Our Shared Heritage

Reversing catastrophic threats to our planet’s biodiversity is not optional: our lives depend on it.
Although countless species have come and gone, today we share the planet with tens of millions of species, simultaneously shaping the Earth’s very form and function. . . .
By Thomas E. Lovejoy

Opinion: Exploring a Little-Known Planet

Cataloging the staggering richness of Earth’s species will have multiple payoffs.
One of the fundamental questions of biology is the amount and full nature of biodiversity on Earth. It should be worrisome to all that 250 years after Carl Linnaeus introduced the practice of binomial nomenclature and articulated the goal of identifying all species of organisms, we still have accounted for only a tiny fraction of the whole. . . .
By Edward O. Wilson

Slide Show: Newly Discovered Species

Life on Earth is mind-bogglingly diverse with estimates of the number of existing species in the tens of millions. Over the last 4 billion years, many species have gone extinct; and because of the actions of humans, many existing species are now endangered. New species are constantly being discovered, however, such as the ones pictured in this slideshow, collected during the recent Census of Marine Life.

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