HENRY

The Encyclopedia of Life has gone online. Unfortunately, she’s currently dead in the water:

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Fortunately, Carl Zimmer has a nice shiny piece on it in the NY Times - The Encyclopedia of Life, No bookshelf required:

Imagine the Book of All Species: a single volume made up of one-page descriptions of every species known to science. On one page is the blue-footed booby. On another, the Douglas fir. Another, the oyster mushroom. If you owned the Book of All Species, you would need quite a bookshelf to hold it. Just to cover the 1.8 million known species, the book would have to be more than 300 feet long. And you’d have to be ready to expand the bookshelf strikingly, because scientists estimate there are 10 times more species waiting to be discovered.

Rod Page, who has been rather critical of these projects in the past (“Let’s hope that the fate of EoL will be different to that of the similarly ambitious All Species. Oh, and then there’s SpeciesBase…”) has unfortunately promised to behave himself…

Posted on February 27th, 2008 by Simon Greenhill