One fact that still blows my mind is that into the 1990's, there were something like 12,000 known prokaryotic species, and microbiologists estimated anywhere from 100,000 to a million were still undiscovered, since they didn't like to grow in a Petri dish. But with the advent of PCR based techniques, that number grew to one trillion . Not only whole new phyla but two entire new branches of life (DPANN and CPR) were d…
Fascinating! Is the way these new groups mess with their genetics different enough from the rest of Earth’s life to require another shift in how we classify them? “What ‘known species’ even means” points to maybe yes, but I’m not versed in genetics and just found out about these groups from your post.
It’s only been, what, 20 or 30 years since our ability to look at genes started really shaking up taxonomy and yielded “the phylogenetic tree.” I wonder what studying these tiny weirdos will teach us about what we still don’t know about our own more stable branches.