A global project to catalogue every species on the planet has reached a milestone with the announcement that it has passed the one-millionth entry. Six years into the Species 2000 programme, researchers say they now have 1,009,000 living organisms contained within their databases. They hope to complete the basic listing by 2011, reaching an expected total of 1.75 million species, although experts within the programme believe that the actual number of different living organisms is between eight and 12 million. Professor Thomas Orrell, a biologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC, said the finished catalogue would list all known living organisms, from plants and animals to fungi and micro-organisms such as bacteria, protozoa and viruses. ‘Many are surprised that, despite over two centuries of work by biologists and the current worldwide interest in biodiversity, there is currently no comprehensive catalogue of all known species of organisms on Earth,’ Prof Orrell said. The listing does not include fossil species from the past. It does include elephants, elephant seals, elephant grass and elephant trunk fish, as well as a shark and a virus both with the word elephant in their names. […]