DailyDirt: Another Day, Another New Species... from the urls-we-
dig-up dept Humans may have made themselves masters of this
planet, but there are still places on Earth that have been
relatively untouched by people, where many new species of life
are waiting to be discovered. Most of these lifeforms are very
tiny -- insects, bacteria, and other microorganisms -- and they
tend to live in extreme conditions, which is probably why they
have escaped our discovery for so long. Here are just a few
examples of what scientists are doing to make us more bio-
literate. - How many species of life exist on Earth? According
to the National Science Foundation's "Tree of Life" project,
there may be anywhere from 5 million to 100 million species on
Earth. So far we have identified only about 2 million. [url] -
Penn State researchers have been studying the ultrasmall
microbial population found at a depth of over 3,000 meters in a
120,000-year-old Greenland glacier ice core. They were able to
isolate a variety of tiny microbes t