PARASTRATIOSPHECOMYIA stratiosphecomyioides, Micropachycephalosaurus hongtuyanensis, Aquila chrysaetos simurgh. Put yourself in Noah’s position, when he had the tedious task to select two of every kind for his Ark. Would you be able to spell, let alone identify this fly, dinosaur and eagle?
It might be a bit easier for the bug Orizabus subaziroI, which can be read either forward or in reverse direction, the beetle Agra schwarzeneggeri, the spider Calponia harrisonfordi or the ant Proceratium google. But have you ever heard of them?
Unlike Noah in the Genesis, you could now just flash your smartphone, open the DNA Barcode App, scan every animal passing by, the name would pop up on your screen, and you could tick it off the list.
This app works just like the scanner of a supermarket, which distinguishes, for instance, different cans of tomato soup and shows their price, using the little black stripes of the Universal Product Code (UPC).
Instead of the black stripes on a can, this new gimmick uses snippets of the DNA, the genetic information of every living being, to tell you whether you deal with the cicada Zyzza or the sponge Zyzzya. Two items may look, or sound, very similar to the untrained eye or ear, but in both cases the barcodes are distinct. Filling the Ark is dead easy now.
The world’s oldest profession
SOUNDS a bit too much like science fiction? Sorry to say, you are right. Even though science has made tremendous progress and we now have an electronic catalog of almost all known plants and animals, such scanner of the “Barcode of Life” is still a long way ahead. More on this later. For now, luckily the good old taxonomists are still out there to help you.
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