Species CardsSurprising Facts About Dozens of Organisms

Real basis

• Nostoc commune: can stay dormant for years when dry, and resumes photosynthesis within hours of getting wet.

• Prochlorococcus (Prochlorococcus marinus): the most abundant photosynthetic organism on Earth, discovered only in 1988.

• E. coli (Escherichia coli): one of the most important model organisms in molecular biology, dividing about every 20 minutes under ideal conditions.

• Rickettsia prowazekii: the pathogen of epidemic typhus, and one of the bacteria most closely related to mitochondria.

• Pea rhizobium (Rhizobium leguminosarum): lives in the root nodules of legumes and turns nitrogen from the air into nutrients plants can use.

• Lactobacillus delbrueckii: one of the main players in making yogurt.

• Deinococcus radiodurans: can withstand ionizing radiation about a thousand times the lethal dose for humans.

• Tuberculosis bacterium (Mycobacterium tuberculosis): discovered by Koch in 1882, and still one of the deadliest pathogens.

• Halobacterium salinarum: lives in saturated brine and absorbs sunlight with purple bacteriorhodopsin.

• Methanobrevibacter smithii: the main methane-producing archaeon in the human gut.

• Sulfolobus acidocaldarius: lives in hot springs at about 80°C that are strongly acidic.

• Physarum polycephalum: a brainless single-celled slime mold that can find the shortest route through a maze and once reproduced the Tokyo railway network.

• Paramecium (Paramecium caudatum): covered in thousands of cilia, the single-celled organism most often seen in biology class.

• Plasmodium falciparum: spread by mosquitoes. Artemisinin, discovered by Tu Youyou, has saved millions of lives and won the 2015 Nobel Prize.

• Lingulodinium polyedra: glows blue when disturbed, making night waves on the California coast shine.

• Nori (Pyropia yezoensis): the nori on the dinner table; its group has one of the oldest eukaryote fossil records.

• Volvox (Volvox carteri): a hollow ball made of thousands of cells, a classic organism for studying the origin of multicellularity.

• Sphagnum moss (Sphagnum): peatlands cover only about 3% of the land, yet store more carbon than all the world's forests.

• Lepidodendron: giant lycophyte trees more than 30 m tall, an important source of Carboniferous coal seams.

• Field horsetail (Equisetum arvense): horsetails once grew into trees, and now only one genus is left.

• Alsophila spinulosa: a tree fern that already existed in the time of the dinosaurs, called a "living fossil".

• Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba): the only surviving species of its class, whose close relatives have all gone extinct.

• Coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens): the tallest living tree, reaching about 116 m.

• Welwitschia (Welwitschia mirabilis): grows only two leaves in its whole life, and an individual can live for over a thousand years.

• Giant water lily (Victoria amazonica): leaves can reach about 3 m across.

• Soybean (Glycine max): originated in China and fixes its own nitrogen with the help of rhizobia.

• Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula): the leaf must be touched twice before it snaps shut, as if "counting".

• Tea (Camellia sinensis): native to southwest China, now one of the most widely drunk beverages in the world.

• Rice (Oryza sativa): feeds about half of the world's population.

• Orchid family (Orchidaceae): about 28,000 species, one of the most species-rich plant families.

• Penicillium (Penicillium rubens): the mold strain in which Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928 belongs here.

• Baker's yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae): in 1996 it became the first eukaryote to have its whole genome sequenced.

• Zombie-ant fungus (Ophiocordyceps unilateralis): after infecting an ant, it makes the ant climb high, bite a leaf vein, and die there.

• Honey fungus (Armillaria ostoyae): one individual in Oregon covers nearly 10 square kilometers and may be the largest living thing on Earth.

• Venus' flower basket (Euplectella aspergillum): a pair of small shrimp often live inside its glassy skeleton and never get out for the rest of their lives.

• Hydra (Hydra vulgaris): hardly ages, and even cut into pieces it can regenerate into whole animals.

• Planarian (Schmidtea mediterranea): cut into a hundred pieces, each piece can grow into a new flatworm.

• Common earthworm (Lumbricus terrestris): the last book Darwin published in his lifetime was about earthworms.

• C. elegans (Caenorhabditis elegans): the hermaphrodite adult has exactly 959 somatic cells, and the origin of every one has been traced.

• Water bear (Milnesium tardigradum): sent into low Earth orbit in 2007, it survived the vacuum and cosmic radiation.

• Nautilus (Nautilus pompilius): the shape of nautiloids has changed little in 500 million years, earning them the name "living fossils".

• Common octopus (Octopus vulgaris): about two-thirds of its neurons are located in its arms.

• Giant squid (Architeuthis dux): eyes up to about 27 cm across; it was first photographed in the wild only in 2004.

• Lingula (Lingula anatina): the shape of tongue shells has barely changed in 500 million years.

• Eldredgeops (Eldredgeops rana): trilobite eyes were made of calcite crystals, and the lenses of Eldredgeops were double-layered, correcting aberration.

• Proetus: among the last trilobites, which held on until the End-Permian extinction.

• Atlantic horseshoe crab (Limulus polyphemus): its blue blood is used to test whether drugs and vaccines are contaminated with bacterial endotoxins.

• Meganeura (Meganeura monyi): wingspan of about 70 cm, linked to the oxygen-rich atmosphere of its time.

• Arthropleura: up to about 2.6 m long, the largest land arthropod known.

• Leafcutter ant (Atta cephalotes): grows fungus for food, one of the earliest "farmers" apart from humans.

• Western honey bee (Apis mellifera): uses the "waggle dance" to tell nestmates the direction and distance of nectar; von Frisch won the 1973 Nobel Prize for it.

• Fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster): Morgan used it to show that genes sit on chromosomes, winning the 1933 Nobel Prize.

• Silkworm (Bombyx mori): domesticated in China for about 5,000 years; the silk of a single cocoon can be over a thousand meters long.

• West Indian Ocean coelacanth (Latimeria chalumnae): once thought long extinct, until one was caught by fishermen in South Africa in 1938.

• Dunkleosteus (Dunkleosteus terrelli): a top predator of the Devonian; it had no teeth and crushed prey with sharp bony plates.

• Megalodon (Otodus megalodon): one of the largest sharks known, extinct about 3.6 million years ago.

• Whale shark (Rhincodon typus): the largest living fish, yet it feeds on plankton.

• Chinese giant salamander (Andrias davidianus): one of the largest living amphibians, nicknamed the "baby fish" in Chinese.

• Axolotl (Ambystoma mexicanum): stays in its larval form all its life and can regrow limbs.

• Golden poison frog (Phyllobates terribilis): the toxin in its skin is enough to kill several adults.

• Tuatara (Sphenodon punctatus): the only surviving species of the order Rhynchocephalia, with a "third eye" on top of its head.

• Chinese alligator (Alligator sinensis): found only in China; at one point only a little over a hundred were left in the wild.

• Panther chameleon (Furcifer pardalis): changes color by adjusting the spacing of nanocrystals in its skin.

• Tyrannosaurus rex: its bite force is estimated at tens of thousands of newtons, among the strongest of any land animal.

• Velociraptor (Velociraptor mongoliensis): actually only the size of a turkey, and covered in feathers.

• Spinosaurus (Spinosaurus aegyptiacus): had a huge sail on its back and may have lived a semi-aquatic life.

• Stegosaurus: up to 9 m long, with a brain the size of a walnut.

• Triceratops (Triceratops horridus): lived at the very end of the Cretaceous, in the same time as T. rex.

• Parasaurolophus (Parasaurolophus walkeri): its hollow crest may have been used to make deep sounds.

• Pteranodon (Pteranodon longiceps): wingspan of more than 6 m, but pterosaurs were not dinosaurs.

• Elasmosaurus (Elasmosaurus platyurus): has more than 70 vertebrae in its neck.

• Mosasaurus (Mosasaurus hoffmannii): one of the top predators of the oceans at the end of the Cretaceous.

• Archaeopteryx (Archaeopteryx lithographica): discovered in 1861, just two years after On the Origin of Species was published.

• Medium ground finch (Geospiza fortis): the Grants observed that after a severe drought their beaks became noticeably thicker within a single generation.

• Dodo (Raphus cucullatus): went extinct in the late 17th century, a symbol of species extinction caused by humans.

• Emperor penguin (Aptenodytes forsteri): can dive to more than 500 m.

• New Caledonian crow (Corvus moneduloides): shapes twigs into hooked tools to pull out insects.

• Platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus): a mammal that lays eggs; males also have a venomous spur on the hind leg.

• Woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius): the last ones lived on Wrangel Island until about 4,000 years ago, by which time the pyramids had already been built.

• North American beaver (Castor canadensis): one beaver dam in Canada is about 850 m long and can be seen from satellites.

• Tiger (Panthera tigris): the largest living cat.

• Giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca): a member of the order Carnivora that eats almost nothing but bamboo.

• Wolf (Canis lupus): all dogs were domesticated from wolves.

• Horse (Equus caballus): evolved from the fox-sized Hyracotherium, a classic example in evolution textbooks.

• Giraffe (Giraffa camelopardalis): despite its long neck, it has only 7 neck vertebrae, the same as a human.

• Blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus): the largest animal known ever to have lived.

• Sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus): has the largest brain in the animal kingdom.

• Bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus): every dolphin has its own distinctive "signature whistle", which works like a name.

• Big brown bat (Eptesicus fuscus): catches flying insects in the dark using echolocation.

• Aurochs (Bos primigenius): the wild ancestor of domestic cattle; the last one died in Poland in 1627.

• Homo sapiens: the DNA of any two people is about 99.9% identical.

Related research

These studies relate to this topic but are not direct proof of this page.

• A third kind of life: Comparing ribosomal RNA showed that “bacteria” are actually two very different kinds of life, and archaea became their own branch.

  Source: Woese & Fox, PNAS 1977, "Phylogenetic structure of the prokaryotic domain: The primary kingdoms"

• The three-domain system: The tree of life was redivided into three domains: Bacteria, Archaea and Eukaryotes.

  Source: Woese, Kandler & Wheelis, PNAS 1990, "Towards a natural system of organisms: proposal for the domains Archaea, Bacteria, and Eucarya"

• Endosymbiotic theory: Margulis proposed that mitochondria and chloroplasts were once independent bacteria that were swallowed and became part of the cell. It was rejected by over a dozen journals.

  Source: Sagan (Margulis), Journal of Theoretical Biology 1967, "On the origin of mitosing cells"

• The home of LUCA: Working back from modern genes, the common ancestor of all life may have lived near hot, oxygen-free, hydrogen-rich deep-sea vents.

  Source: Weiss et al., Nature Microbiology 2016, "The physiology and habitat of the last universal common ancestor"

• Snowball Earth: Rock layers in Namibia show that about 700 million years ago Earth may have been almost completely covered in ice.

  Source: Hoffman et al., Science 1998, "A Neoproterozoic snowball Earth"

• The rise of oxygen: Oxygen in the atmosphere did not arrive all at once, but rose through a long, repeated process.

  Source: Lyons, Reinhard & Planavsky, Nature 2014, "The rise of oxygen in Earth's early ocean and atmosphere"

• The double helix: A one-page paper proposed that DNA is a double helix, and base pairing hinted at how genetic information is copied.

  Source: Watson & Crick, Nature 1953, "Molecular structure of nucleic acids: A structure for deoxyribose nucleic acid"

• Asgard archaea: Lokiarchaeota found in deep-sea sediments carry many genes once thought to exist only in eukaryotes.

  Source: Spang et al., Nature 2015, "Complex archaea that bridge the gap between prokaryotes and eukaryotes"

• The earliest sexual reproduction: Fossils of an ancient red alga show sexual reproduction and multicellular life have at least a billion years of history.

  Source: Butterfield, Paleobiology 2000, "Bangiomorpha pubescens n. gen., n. sp.: implications for the evolution of sex, multicellularity, and the Mesoproterozoic/Neoproterozoic radiation of eukaryotes"

• 3.7-billion-year-old stromatolites: Rocks in Greenland may preserve microbial structures 3.7 billion years old, although this interpretation is still disputed.

  Source: Nutman et al., Nature 2016, "Rapid emergence of life shown by discovery of 3,700-million-year-old microbial structures"

• Natural selection: Darwin and Wallace jointly published the theory of natural selection. The next year, On the Origin of Species came out.

  Source: Darwin & Wallace, Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society 1858, "On the tendency of species to form varieties; and on the perpetuation of varieties and species by natural means of selection"

• The dinosaur extinction puzzle: Iridium is anomalously enriched in the end-Cretaceous layer, and the Alvarezes, father and son, concluded that an asteroid had hit Earth.

  Source: Alvarez et al., Science 1980, "Extraterrestrial cause for the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction"

• Finding the crater: Buried under Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula is a crater about 180 km across, exactly what that asteroid left behind.

  Source: Hildebrand et al., Geology 1991, "Chicxulub Crater: A possible Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary impact crater on the Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico"

• Tiktaalik: Scientists predicted which age of rock the transitional fossil should be in, and then really found it in the Canadian Arctic.

  Source: Daeschler, Shubin & Jenkins, Nature 2006, "A Devonian tetrapod-like fish and the evolution of the tetrapod body plan"

• The earliest animals: Dickinsonia fossils preserve cholesterol-type molecules, proving this mysterious creature was an animal.

  Source: Bobrovskiy et al., Science 2018, "Ancient steroids establish the Ediacaran fossil Dickinsonia as one of the earliest animals"

• The earliest vertebrates: Myllokunmingia and Haikouichthys found in Chengjiang, Yunnan, pushed the history of vertebrates back to the early Cambrian.

  Source: Shu et al., Nature 1999, "Lower Cambrian vertebrates from south China"

• Feathered dinosaurs: Fossils from Liaoning show that feathers grew on dinosaurs before birds appeared.

  Source: Ji, Currie, Norell & Ji, Nature 1998, "Two feathered dinosaurs from northeastern China"

• The first flower: Archaefructus from Liaoning was considered one of the earliest flowering plants, and its age was later revised to the Early Cretaceous.

  Source: Sun et al., Science 1998, "In search of the first flower: a Jurassic angiosperm, Archaefructus, from northeast China"

• Punctuated equilibrium: Species may stay stable for a long time and then change rapidly in a short time, rather than evolving at a steady rate.

  Source: Eldredge & Gould, Models in Paleobiology 1972, "Punctuated equilibria: an alternative to phyletic gradualism"

• The worst mass extinction: Precise dating shows the end-Permian extinction may have lasted only about 60,000 years, matching Siberian volcanic activity.

  Source: Burgess, Bowring & Shen, PNAS 2014, "High-precision timeline for Earth's most severe extinction"

• Whales that walked on land: Fossils from Pakistan show that the ancestors of whales were hoofed animals that ran on land, related to hippos.

  Source: Thewissen et al., Nature 2001, "Skeletons of terrestrial cetaceans and the relationship of whales to artiodactyls"