Taxonomic impediment

Imagine you have lots and lots of different animals in a big room. You want to organize them into groups based on what they look like and how they act. This is called taxonomy.

But there's a problem: you don't know everything about every animal in the room. Some animals might look similar but be very different on the inside. Other animals might be a new type that nobody knows about yet.

This makes it hard to put all the animals in the right group. It's like trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle without all the pieces.

This is what scientists call the taxonomic impediment. They want to organize all the organisms on Earth into groups called species, but it's hard to do that when there are so many unknowns.

Because of this, it can take a long time to figure out how many different species there are in the world, and some species might go undiscovered for a while. But scientists keep working on this puzzle, trying to fit all the pieces together so we can better understand how life on Earth is connected.