See the American Museum of Natural History curator Mark Sidall explain his fascination with leeches, which he and other scientists are using to infer biodiversity in some far-flung places.

Scientists are searching for signatures of mammals within the blood meals of the invertebrates.

The new database includes data from 27,000 samples collected at sites ranging from Alaskan permafrost to the ocean floor.

A sampling of some of the fascinating critters identified by scientists this year

The shotgun approach, typically thought to be the superior method, may substantially underestimate diversity in environments that have not already been classified, researchers find.

Little penguins (Eudyptula minor) live on the southeast coast of Australia, one of the global “hot spots” of marine diversity most severely affected by global warming.

A look at some of the species named this year

From a new Tyrannosaurus and many other dinosaurs to all of the living species named this year, researchers continue to chip away at the planet’s unknown biodiversity.

Researchers are abandoning the concept of a list of genes sequenced from a single individual, instead aiming for a way to describe all the genetic variation within a species.