Scientists have spent five years classifying the size, mass and population of all living organisms, and at the end they made a surprising discovery — that the tiniest and largest living entities on Earth dominate by sheer mass.
To tackle this gargantuan task, the team, led by biologists from Rutgers University in New Jersey, and the University of British Columbia, divided life into 36 categories across terrestrial, marine and subterranean environments. Within each group, they identified the biggest, smallest and most common body size. Then, combining that information with pre-existing data on each group's biomass, they estimated how much of the Earth's biomass each category comprised.
