National Geographic has published news that comes as no surprise to cryptozoologists and monster enthusiasts worldwide, and that is the fact that even after centuries of effort, some 86% of Earth’s species have yet to be fully described.
According to a new study, scientists have cataloged less than 15% of species now alive and that current extinction rates mean many UNCLASSIFIED organisms will wink out of existence before they can be recorded. This study also speculates that our planet is home to 8.7 million species. The study was driven by a simple question by Boris Worm of Canada’s Dalhousie University:
“Are we within reach of finding all species, or are we way off? The answer is, we are way off.”
Two hundred and fifty years after Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus devised a formal system for classifying the diversity of nature, the catalog for some classes of living things — such as mammals and birds — is nearly complete, the study says, but the inventories for other classes of yet to be DISCOVERED SPECIES are woefully sparse. According to Worm:
“There is an age of discovery ahead of us when we could find out so much more of what lives with us on this planet.”