Quote:
Originally Posted by Doug
Seriously, is this science?
How can it be known how many of anything remains to be discovered? Surely if there are more species of Dino to be discovered, and there might well be, how can the number be known or even guestimated?
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If you had read the entire page:
http://scienceblogs.com/afarensis/20...ils_are_there/
there are some comments at the foot of the page about the statistical techniques involved.
Basically, you start with the diversity of life we observe around us and the number of species and genuses alive now and look at how closely their physiology is related (ie you are looking at a spectum of variation) and compare that with the known sample of extinct species and assume that they had just as many closely related species living along side them.
There are quite a few of these statistical techniques in biology which can be used to estimate population sizes of wild animals etc.
Astronomy uses the same techniques to estimate the number of stars, galaxies etc. without having to count each individual one.