It's astounding how many different species of insects you can find even if you limit yourself to just a fairly small area.
In the book "Life on a Little Known Planet: A Biologist's View of Insects and Their World" [1] the author says that he used to set out insect traps every summer at his home in--if I remember correctly--New England, and every summer he would find species that were unknown to him. He'd then check the literature to identify them and every summer would find that he'd caught some that were unknown to science.
The author's research was on parasitic wasps and he was one of the world's foremost authorities on the subject, yet his summer traps would even trap parasitic wasps that were not yet known to science.
Think about that--this was not in some remote area that humans had barely reached where finding unknown plants and animals is something you'd expect. This was at a professor's house in a part of the planet that has been extensively explored for centuries.
I read somewhere that there can be over 10 billion virus particles in a liter of sea water. There's no way we know everything in there. It's easier to see and count larger things, but we're really just point sampling a HUGE space when it comes to looking at living creatures.
And life is kind of a continuum - it's not like one day a neandrathal gave birth to a human and that was that - each new generation is a new level of the tree evolving in a certain direction and slightly different than anything that came before it.
The average number of legs of living things is 0.01.
"If you count up all the animals in the world, the average number of legs each animal has is 0.01 legs. This is because the huge numbers of nematodes in the world, which have no legs. There are 10 to the power of 22 nematodes in the world, which means there are 100 times more nematodes than mites in the world, and 1,000 times more nematodes than insects. One nematode lives as a parasite in the human eye that can grow up to 7cm in length."
In the book "Life on a Little Known Planet: A Biologist's View of Insects and Their World" [1] the author says that he used to set out insect traps every summer at his home in--if I remember correctly--New England, and every summer he would find species that were unknown to him. He'd then check the literature to identify them and every summer would find that he'd caught some that were unknown to science.
The author's research was on parasitic wasps and he was one of the world's foremost authorities on the subject, yet his summer traps would even trap parasitic wasps that were not yet known to science.
Think about that--this was not in some remote area that humans had barely reached where finding unknown plants and animals is something you'd expect. This was at a professor's house in a part of the planet that has been extensively explored for centuries.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Life-Little-Known-Planet-Biologists/d...