Popular Mechanics
By Darren OrfPublished: Feb 18, 2026 8:00 AM EST
We’ve spent billions scanning the skies for signs of life on other worlds, but here’s the embarrassing part: we still don’t really know how much life is on this one. A landmark 2011 study pegged Earth’s species count at a tidy 8.75 million, and that number became the go-to estimate for over a decade. But molecular tools like DNA barcoding have been quietly blowing that figure apart. Fungi alone may number over 6 million species. Insects could top 20 million. Bacteria? Possibly trillions. Now, a new study suggests that vertebrates—the animals we thought we knew best—may also have been undercounted by roughly half, thanks to a hidden world of cryptic species that look identical on the outside, but are genetically distinct. The real number of species sharing this planet with us seems to be much bigger than we thought.
Super Sleuth
