@johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz
2026-03-06 23:26 UTC
@TonyVladusich@mathstodon.xyz - I was just wrong about this, so I'll change my post.
We've only found about 6,758 living mammal species. But since 2005, there have been 805 newly described mammal species (and 774 split from known species, which is rather a different matter), which is about 40 per year.
Eventually this will slow to a trickle. This is quite unlike insects, where there's a vast number of species, and some estimate 80% of them are waiting to be catalogued.
https://www.mammaldiversity.org/
Replies (1)
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@johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz 2026-03-06 23:33
@TonyVladusich@mathstodon.xyz - However, there's a fascinating thing called the Good-Turing estimator. "Good–Turing frequency estimation is a statistical technique for estimating the probability of encountering an object of a hitherto unseen species, given a set of past observations of objects from different species." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good%E2%80%93Turing_frequency_estimation