How did Noah's Ark float? New species cram aboard

By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent

OSLO (Reuters) - How did Noah's Ark manage to stay afloat? Estimates of the number of species on earth are surging into apparently hull-busting millions as biologists find new life almost everywhere they look, from African swamps to Antarctica.

The ever-widening menagerie is a paradox when an expanding human population, pollution and climate change threaten what United Nations' studies say is the worst spate of extinctions since the dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago.

Government officials trying to protect the modern world's wildlife gather in Bonn from May 19-30 for a meeting of the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity, to examine progress towards a goal set in 2002 of slowing biodiversity loss by 2010.

Most experts say the target is slipping out of reach.

Even so, wider research means finds of new species such as a legless lizard in Brazil or a Tanzanian shrew are testing biblical scholars' calculations on how Noah squeezed all animals aboard the Ark.

"It's of course physically impossible," James Edwards, executive director of the Encyclopedia of Life, said of the biblical account.

The Encylopedia is cataloguing all identified species, 1.8 million so far, in a free online service (http://www.eol.org/).

"There are expectations of 8 to 50 million more species out there that we haven't identified yet," Edwards said. Other experts' estimates of the numbers range up to 100 million.