ABSTRACT
Taxonomy is the scientific discipline we use to identify, describe, and classify living organisms. Linnaeus, who made the first effective attempts to both describe and catalogue Earth’s biodiversity, is rightly referred to as the “Father of Taxonomy.” Linnaean zootaxonomy has the official starting date of January 1, 1758 (Linnaeus, 1758), and a quarter of a millennium later, with an arsenal of new tools for delimiting living diversity, we find ourselves entering a potential taxonomic Golden Age. E.O. Wilson has spoken and written many times of our priority task of “completing the Linnaean Enterprise” (e.g., Wilson, 2000), and the biodiversity informatics tools that are now available to us make the completion of the Linnaean Enterprise an imminent possibility. Given this current potential, for those outside the field of zootaxonomy it must come as a surprise and a disappointment to discover just how far we still are from completing the identification and reliable cataloguing of Earth’s animal biodiversity.
