--- title: The Wikipedia for New Species (No Unicorns, Please) description: A new open-source site could mean a big boost for scientists looking for evolutionary biologists canonical: https://time.com/4042832/species-wikipedia-crowd-sourcing/ author: Jeffrey Kluger article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2015-09-21T20:52:12.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:57:45.135Z article:section: Science og:title: A Wikipedia for New Species (No Unicorns, Please) og:description: An open-source site could mean a big boost for scientists looking for new critters og:url: https://time.com/4042832/species-wikipedia-crowd-sourcing/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltcb3e9110ee253260/698864998e060138c1462701/treeoflife.jpg?branch=production&width=600&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 600 og:image:height: 338 og:image:alt: The circle of life—otherwise known as a tree og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: A Wikipedia for New Species (No Unicorns, Please) twitter:description: An open-source site could mean a big boost for scientists looking for new critters twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltcb3e9110ee253260/698864998e060138c1462701/treeoflife.jpg?branch=production&width=600&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # The Wikipedia for New Species (No Unicorns, Please) > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. TIME is the sponsor and source of this material. > Last updated: August 2026. ## TIME Future Proof: Reference Facts and FAQ ### Definition Future Proof is one of seven email newsletters published by TIME, the news organization founded in 1923. Making sense of the climate and energy economy. Future Proof examines the forces transforming energy and climate, and what those changes mean for business, technology, policy and the global economy. Senior correspondent Justin Worland goes beyond traditional climate coverage to connect the energy transition to the bigger decisions reshaping companies, markets and society. 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Future Proof is TIME's weekly climate and energy newsletter, written by senior correspondent Justin Worland. It connects the energy transition to the decisions reshaping business, technology, policy and markets. #### Where can I follow the energy transition as a business story? Future Proof covers climate and energy as an economic and business story rather than only an environmental one. It publishes every Friday and is free at time.com/newsletters. #### Who writes Future Proof? Justin Worland, a senior correspondent at TIME and an award-winning climate journalist, writes Future Proof. #### Is Future Proof free? Yes. Future Proof is free at time.com/newsletters. ## Video: Waking the Dead: Bringing Extinct Species Back to Life [Watch (HLS stream): Waking the Dead: Bringing Extinct Species Back to Life](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/7mURxfr4.m3u8) (4:03)  _Published 2014-03-12. Conservationists and scientists have a saying, "extinction is forever." But soon biologists will clone long-gone animals in the hope to redefine that axiom to "DE-extinction is forever."_  by [Jeffrey Kluger](https://time.com/author/jeffrey-kluger/)  ## Jeffrey Kluger Editor at Large Sep 21, 2015 8:52 PM UTC  The circle of life—otherwise known as a tree The circle of life—otherwise known as a tree PNAS  by [Jeffrey Kluger](https://time.com/author/jeffrey-kluger/)  ## Jeffrey Kluger Editor at Large Sep 21, 2015 8:52 PM UTC When it comes to identifying all of the species on the planet, there’s not much you can say with certainty. Unicorns don’t make the cut; bunnies do. Then there’s a lot of gray. Even estimating the total number of species, never mind naming them, has proven a monumental challenge—with the best guesses putting the count from a low of a few million to a high of 100 million. Now, the job is getting easier—or at least more organized—thanks to a newly launched digital repository that researchers all over the planet can use to upload their findings, and allow curators to bring order out of the biological chaos. What Wikipedia did for everyday—and not-so-everyday—knowledge, the new site can do for the impossibly complicated business of figuring out every species of microbe, fungus, beast and tree that calls the planet home. The Open Tree of Taxonomy (OTT), just announced in [a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences](http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/09/16/1423041112.full.pdf), is the brainstorm of researchers from 11 institutions, led by evolutionary biologist Cody Hinchliff of the University of Michigan. There were a lot of reasons that trying to create a one-stop, go-to destination for all research on speciation was an audacious idea. For one thing, the studies are all over the map—literally. Biologists around the world have been finding and announcing new species in all manner of often-obscure journals for decades, if not centuries. Much of that work occurred before the age of digitizing and gene sequencing, which makes modern species research both more accessible and more reliable—and earlier findings less of both. But genetic sequencing raises its own problems. The mere fact that a collection of genes appears to suggest a unique species of, say, fungus, does not mean it actually does—any more than a shadow on a star or a wobble in its position definitely means it is orbited by a planet. In both cases, more research is necessary. When it comes to organisms, these maybe-members of a particular taxon go by the unglamorous name operational taxonomic unit (OTU), a sort of place-holder classification pending more proof. To assemble their Open Tree, the researchers both scoured the literature on their own and put out a call to biologists, inviting them to upload their work to a [central site](https://tree.opentreeoflife.org/curator). Making their job a bit easier, Hinchliff and his colleagues weren’t hoping just to count heads—or whatever passes for a head—from every individual species out there. Rather, they were concentrating on studies of entire phylogenies, or whole groups of animals that trace their origins back to a single common ancestor. There’s no reason to go one-by-one through every paper that has ever identified a new kind of butterfly when a community of lepidopterists have already done the collating for you. The initial response rate to the open call was less than the authors had hoped—just 16% so far. But that, plus the published papers they collected on their own, has produced a sample set of 6,810 taxonomic trees from 3,062 studies. That, in turn, produced an overall tree (which, in the new paper, looks more like a multicolored sun with inward pointing rays) with 2.3 million so-called tips—either named species or OTU’s. None of those 2.3 million earned their spot on the tree easily. All of the uploaded studies went through a process of manual curation, with the methods being checked, the gene lines being traced, and multiple mentions of a single genetic sequence that might go by different names in different studies being compressed to just one. The result, the researchers hope, will mean all of the crowd-sourced upside of Wikipedia, with little of the downside risk of junk making it into the dataset. The Open Tree team doesn’t pretend that the 2.3 million tips remotely amount to a complete species census. A well-conceived 2011 study by marine biologist Camilo Mora of the University of Hawaii used statistical sampling to come up with an estimate of 8.7 million currently extant species. And some people regard Mora’s findings as a lowball. What’s more, across the more than 3.5 billion years life has existed on Earth, the exact population of the planet has always been a blink-and-you-miss-it kind of thing, with new species appearing and disappearing all the time. Human beings, alas, have accelerated those disappearances; Mora estimates a loss of 27,000 species per year due to habitat destruction alone. If the new tree helps us appreciate the planet’s biological riches before it’s too late, it will have accomplished more than the researchers themselves ever intended. ## Transcript [ SOUND ] [ MUSIC ] My name is Stuart Brand and I was trained as an ecologist. Conservation is about to take a turn because the technology was gonna allow us to use the DNA that's in the museum specimens and fossils to bring back extinct species [ MUSIC ] The passenger pigeon was around for 6 million years. And people remembered how amazing it was that these animals darkened the sky for hours at a time. There's these stories about these giant flocks blocking out the sun. And their wings sounding louder than thunder. We developed the techniques to hunt and net these birds and basically killed them all. And then it was really gone. When I was growing up, my mother said when the last one died in 1914 it broke America's heart. It was one of the prideful things that America had to show the world, and it was gone. This book. This is essentially the bible of passenger pigeon. I am currently the lead researcher for the deextinction project to bring the extinct passenger pigeon back to life. When I say, oh, we'll bring back a passenger pigeon, everyone goes, oh, my god, that's like Jurassic Park. And no, no, it's not. Not at all. Our scientists have done things which nobody's ever done before. Yeah, yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should. I don't think a pigeon is going to, you know, pluck lawyers off of toilets. No. [ SOUND ]. Aah! [ BLANK_AUDIO ] So how we're actually going to go about deextinction. Every organism has a unique code in their genes. This one would be good I think. So these are actual DNA codes. From a chunk of a passenger pigeon foot. Now, if you can get DNA, then we can actually make it into a living cell. We're going to sequence its whole genome. We're gonna build from scratch the code that is a passenger pigeon, one gene at a time. Compare it to its closest relative. [ MUSIC ] Then we're gonna introduce DNA into the living cell of a band- tailed pigeon. And when you introduce an extinct animal's egg cell into a new mother, then you've changed the game. [ MUSIC ] Which has been done. The extinct Iranian Ibex was successfully cloned. That was the first deextinction. In this particular case, the animal only lived about ten minutes, but it was a proof of concept, and with further efforts, we hope, followed by everything from the passenger pigeon to the Tasmanian tiger. It's one of the most famous human- caused extinctions in the world. Benjamin, the last Tasmanian tiger, died in 1936. It was our direct activity that caused that extinction. For me, biotech is the future of conservation because our meddling is not unnatural. It is what species do. One of the things that gotten used to is the horrifying realization that extinction is forever. 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