• Question: How many species of animals exist ?

    Asked by reaganbrien to Ben, Dave, Ed, Sam, Susana on 24 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: David Briggs

      David Briggs answered on 24 Jun 2013:

      Great question – we don’t actually know for sure, but there are though to be more than 8 million. There are large unexplored areas of the world like the deep sea, or the amazon rain forests, where scientists are discovering all sorts of new species all the time – so this number is going up all the time.

      Unfortunately, species going extinct means the number goes down occasionally as well 🙁

    • Photo: Sam Horrell

      Sam Horrell answered on 24 Jun 2013:

      We don’t actually know. Even today we are still disvovering new species, up to 100 per year. It has been estimated that there are 8.7 million species on Earth but we still haven’t discovered 86% of land creatures and 91% of sea creatres.

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