Find your favorite flora and fauna
The Encyclopedia of Life, No Bookshelf Required – New York Times
It sounds surreal, and yet scientists are writing the Book of All Species. Or to be more precise, they are building a Web site called the Encyclopedia of Life (www.eol.org). On Thursday its authors, an international team of scientists, will introduce the first 30,000 pages, and within a decade, they predict, they will have the other 1.77 million.
Definitely the most impressive thing here is the automated populating of the pages using existing databases. What a fantastic idea. Right now, it’s easy to find information for a few model organisms that have large scientific followings but this kind of wikipedia of all organisms is long overdue. Here’s a link to the EOL website.