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We’re discovering new species faster than ever — and it might be our best chance to save them

How scientists (and the rest of us) are finding 16,000 new species a month.

This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get access to member-exclusive stories every month, become a Vox Member today.

When the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus published Systema Naturae in 1735, he set out to classify every living thing on Earth — inventing the naming system we still use today and personally describing more than 10,000 species of plants and animals.

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Nearly three centuries later, with satellites mapping every continent and AI models that can identify a bird by its song, you might assume we’d pretty much finished the job Linnaeus started. We’ve been to the bottom of the ocean. We’ve sequenced the human genome. Surely we’ve cataloged our roommates on this planet.

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We have not. Not even close. Scientists estimate we’ve identified somewhere around one-tenth of all species on Earth — meaning for every species with a name, roughly nine more are waiting in an unsampled river or an unexplored cave.

Or even a museum drawer where they’ve been gathering dust for decades. Hundreds of thousands of unnamed species are already sitting in museum and herbarium collections right now. A quarter of new species descriptions involve specimens more than 50 years old. As the University of Arizona ecologist John Wiens put it: “It’s a poorly known planet that we live on.”

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And now many of that planet’s residents are in trouble. The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) estimates that around 1 million animal and plant species are threatened with extinction, and that extinction rates are at least tens to hundreds of times higher than the background norm. The current extinction rate is somewhere between 100 and 1,000 times the “natural” rate, and the species vanishing fastest are disproportionately the ones we haven’t catalogued........

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