Roughly 300 years ago, Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus set out to identify and name every living organism on Earth. He described more than 10,000 species of plants and animals prior to his death, per ...

Mammals are not especially diverse. Roughly 6,800 mammal species are known to exist, compared with about 8,800 species of amphibian, 11,000 species of bird and 12,500 of reptile. Yet when most people ...