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

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. 

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.

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.”

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 yet: small invertebrates, tropical fungi, deep-sea organisms in habitats we’ve barely surveyed. The race to describe what’s out there has real stakes. You can’t protect what you haven’t found.

So here’s the good news: When it comes to the species on Earth, we’re not actually falling behind. We’re speeding up.

A study published in December in Science Advances by Wiens and colleagues analyzed 1.9 million species from the Catalogue of Life and found that between 2015 and 2020, scientists described more than 16,000 new species per year — the highest rate in the 270-year history of modern taxonomy. Wiens argues that 15 percent of every species known to science has been discovered in just the past two decades.

This was supposed to be going the other direction. Earlier research had suggested that the rate of species description peaked around 1900, back when naturalists in pith helmets were tramping through the tropics and shipping specimens back to European museums in wooden crates. The assumption was that the easy discoveries had been made, and we were in the long tail of diminishing returns. 

Wiens’s data says otherwise. “Some scientists have suggested that the pace of new species descriptions has slowed down and that this indicates we are running out of new species to discover,” he told ScienceDaily. “But our results show the opposite.”

How we got faster

The biggest driver is the DNA revolution. Genome sequencing costs have plummeted from $95 million per human genome in 2001 to hundreds of dollars by the early 2020s — dropping faster than Moore’s Law for long stretches of time. That cost drop has made DNA barcoding cheap enough for widespread use, allowing researchers to distinguish species that look identical to the naked eye but are genetically distinct.

A technique called environmental DNA (eDNA) now lets scientists detect species from trace genetic material — a bit of shed skin in a river, cellular fragments in a soil sample. A single water sample can reveal dozens of species, including rare ones that traditional surveys would miss entirely. In 2025, researchers analyzing archived aerosol filters reconstructed biodiversity data for more than 2,700 genera from airborne eDNA collected over 34 years.

Then there’s the citizen science explosion. iNaturalist, founded in 2008, has passed 200 million verifiable observations — doubling from 100 million in about two years. Over 4 million people around the world are now photographing and uploading every spider, mushroom, and wildflower they encounter, and AI-assisted identification helps sort the results. 

In 2023, two Australian citizen scientists helped discover Inimia nat, an entirely new genus of mantis — the first of its subfamily named since before the moon landing. (The “I. nat” is a nod to the platform.) In Brisbane, a group of young students discovered a fly species previously undetected in Australia and won a Eureka Prize for it. 

And finally, we started looking where we’d never looked. The Ocean Census, a 10-year initiative launched in 2023, has identified 866 likely new marine species across 10 expeditions. A single month-long Schmidt Ocean Institute expedition off the coast of Chile may have turned up more than 100 new species: corals, glass sponges, squat lobsters. (Some estimates find only about 10 percent of marine species have been described, which makes the ocean less a frontier than an entire undiscovered country.) 

In Laos, a zipline tour guide spotted what turned out to be a new dragon lizard genus. In Japan, an undergraduate named Yoshiki Ochiai found a new man-o’-war species on Gamo Beach — a popular surf spot in Sendai — and brought the creature to the lab in a plastic bag. 

And sometimes, we can even find species we’d thought had already gone extinct Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna, one of only five living egg-laying mammals, was rediscovered in 2023 after not being seen since 1961 — captured on the last day of an Oxford expedition into the Cyclops Mountains of Indonesia.

The race against disappearance

But discovery is not protection — and the gap between naming a species and saving it is widening.

A study from Wiens’s own lab found that the proportion of threatened species among newly described ones has risen from 11.9 percent (for species described in the 18th century) to 30 percent today, and is projected to reach 47 percent by 2050. The pattern has become grimly routine: a species gets a name and a Red List designation almost simultaneously. 

The Tapanuli orangutan, described in 2017, was listed critically endangered immediately with fewer than 800 individuals. Every new bird species described in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest between 1980 and 2010 was already threatened. According to Kew Gardens, three in four undescribed plant species are estimated to be threatened with extinction before anyone even names them.

There’s also a whole category that scientists call “dark extinction”: species that vanish before anyone knows they existed. One study estimated that dark extinctions could substantially increase known bird extinction numbers. The IPBES estimates more than 500,000 species have too little habitat left for long-term survival, making them effectively dead species walking (or crawling, or flying). Even as scientists describe new species at record rates, the tropical habitats where most undiscovered species live are being destroyed fastest.

So the race is real. But what the Wiens study shows is that it is still a race — and for the first time in the history of biology, we have the tools to run it faster. The golden age of species discovery isn’t a nostalgic label for the era of Darwin and Wallace. It’s happening now, in sequencing labs and on surf beaches and through the cameras of millions of ordinary people. Linnaeus described 10,000 species in a lifetime of work. We’re now finding that many every seven months. The question is whether we can keep accelerating before the things we haven’t yet found disappear for good.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!