Earth Has 8.7 Million Species, Give or Take Some Fungi

But thanks to one particularly gung-ho species, that number's getting smaller every day.

Keeping in line with humanity's ever-urgent need to put everything into tidy lists, scientists at Dalhousie University have determined that there are 8.7 million different species of plants, animals, fungi, and whatever the other two kingdoms are. However, we've only discovered about a tenth of those species, meaning there are millions of things lurking in our oceans and jungles that have yet to be properly documented. The Dalhousie researchers arrived at the 8.7 million figure by running some models based on the current number of species, and they hope that the new estimate helps spark some interest in the field of taxonomy, or the study of naming and organizing species. Classifying all 8.7 million species, however, would take a herculean effort: 300,000 taxonomists working for 1,200 years at a cost of $364 billion. (Barack Obama, we think we have the cure to your re-election woes: Classify ALL the species.)