Hi all, I am sure that most or all of the people reading this message are as fascinated or more than I am with the diversity of living organisms.
There are some--how many--1.2 million species, and counting?! Knowing even one species to a point of deep understanding is difficult to impossible, let alone the many presented to us in Earth's history of evolution. I estimate that if I wanted to even have a brush with every described (extant) species on the planet, I (at 24 years of age) would need to learn somewhere between 50 and 70 species every day, for the rest of my life, assuming I live to be 100 years old. An impossible goal, but I've started anyway (although not quite at that rate). What I've been doing is (and this could start sounding a little outlandish) reading species lists, looking for phylogenetic information on taxa which have been studied recently, and making databases to organize them. Once I am loosely familiar with the names in their phylogenetic context, I read what I can find about families and genera about general life histories, habitat associations, evolutionary history, etc.. This whole procedure would be a lot easier, I think, if there were already databases (perhaps with references to the published works which were used to construct them) to go off of. Moreover, I think that a widely available information source, organized phylogenetically, would be a great asset to the study of evolutionary biology. I suppose I am imagining something comparable to "Wikipedia," only with references as opposed to condensed, loosely cited, semi-reliable information. Does anyone know whether such databases exist? Thanks, Steve
