• Question: How do you know that all the animals have been discovered?

    Asked by charmhex28986 to Lyn, Katy, Paul, PB, Ruth on 20 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Ee Lyn Lim

      Ee Lyn Lim answered on 20 Jun 2013:

      They HAVEN’T! Isn’t that exciting?? There’s still so much more about this world we haven’t seen. Every year we discover about 18,000 new species, imagine that! Here’s a website that will show you the top 10 most exciting species discovered just this year: http://science.time.com/2013/05/23/cockroaches-sponges-and-snakes-the-top-10-new-species/photo/01a_viola_lilliputana/
      (if you click on the arrows at the top of the picture you can scroll through the pictures of all 10!)

      It’s not all good news though. The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) estimates that between 10,000 and 100,000 species go extinct every year, because of climate change, pollution, poaching and so on. You can read more about it here: http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/biodiversity/biodiversity/

    • Photo: Peter Balfe

      Peter Balfe answered on 20 Jun 2013:

      I do know they definitely haven’t. We keep finding new ones all the time.

    • Photo: Paul Waines

      Paul Waines answered on 20 Jun 2013:

      I don’t think we will ever know this for sure. Some scientists reckon that there are 8.7 million different species of animals, of which only about one eighth have been discovered, but other scientists think there may be 3 times that many insect species alone- and that’s just in the tropics! There are probably another million species waiting to be discovered in the ocean too, so there is an awful lot of discovering still to do!

    • Photo: Katy Brown

      Katy Brown answered on 20 Jun 2013:

      There are loads more animals to discover! I have to admit I learned this fact from QI, but it’s even possible to find new species in your garden – a biologist in Leicestershire only searched in her own back garden and found four completely new species of insect. On a larger scale, a research expedition into oceans around the world in 2012 found over a million new species of animals and plants!

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