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More than 99 percent of all species, amounting to over five billion species, [7] that ever lived on Earth are estimated to be extinct. [8] [9] Estimates on the number of Earth's current species range from 10 million to 14 million, [10] of which about 1.2 million have been documented and over 86 percent have not yet been described. [11]
A life form (also spelled life-form or lifeform) is an entity that is living, [1] [2] such as plants , animals , and fungi . It is estimated that more than 99% of all species that ever existed on Earth, amounting to over five billion species, [3] are extinct. [4] [5] Earth is the only celestial body known to harbor life forms. No form of ...
This is a list of the longest-living biological organisms: the individual(s) (or in some instances, clones) of a species with the longest natural maximum life spans. For a given species, such a designation may include: The oldest known individual(s) that are currently alive, with verified ages.
The earliest evidence for life on Earth includes: 3.8 billion-year-old biogenic hematite in a banded iron formation of the Nuvvuagittuq Greenstone Belt in Canada; [30] graphite in 3.7 billion-year-old metasedimentary rocks in western Greenland; [31] and microbial mat fossils in 3.48 billion-year-old sandstone in Western Australia.
A form of flowering plant that far exceeds Pando as the largest organism on Earth in area and potentially also mass, is the giant marine plant, Posidonia australis, living in Shark Bay, Australia. Its length is about 180 km (112 mi) and it covers an area of 200 km 2 (77 sq mi). [8] [9] It is also among the oldest known clonal plants.
Over 1.5 million living animal species have been described—of which around 1 million are insects—but it has been estimated there are over 7 million in total. Animals range in size from 8.5 millionths of a metre to 33.6 metres (110 ft) long and have complex interactions with each other and their environments, forming intricate food webs .
Pelagibacter ubique is one of the smallest known free-living bacteria, with a length of 370 to 890 nm (0.00037 to 0.00089 mm) and an average cell diameter of 120 to 200 nm (0.00012 to 0.00020 mm). They also have the smallest free-living bacterium genome: 1.3 Mbp, 1354 protein genes, 35 RNA genes. They are one of the most common and smallest ...
[5] [6] [7] This is complicated by a lack of knowledge of the characteristics of living entities, if any, that may have developed outside Earth. [ 8 ] [ 9 ] Philosophical definitions of life have also been put forward, with similar difficulties on how to distinguish living things from the non-living. [ 10 ]