A $150 million effort aims to catalogue species — before it's too late

Researchers have relied on the technique to trace a dead warbler found in the lettuce of a Canadian salad bar back to California. Other scientists have used the strategy to identify China as the true origin for a headless mouse unexpectedly starring in a TV dinner and a deadly pufferfish posing as benign monkfish.

DNA barcoding can readily point out birds or mice or fish that don’t belong, just like a Universal Product Code can determine where a sack of flour should or shouldn’t go in a supermarket. But the real power of the fast-growing science, according to its supporters, is in describing and cataloguing the 98 percent or so of biological life on Earth that has yet to be named.

“Two hundred and fifty years after we began the organization of life, we can’t identify the organisms around us,” said Paul Hebert, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Guelph in Canada. If we are to overcome our biological illiteracy before extinction permanently removes our neighbors, he told attendees at last month’s European Science Open Forum in Barcelona, “we need to look for a technology assist, and it is based on DNA barcoding, reading the stream of information underpinning organisms.” ..cont'd

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25854246/

the major premise was that when man had finally named (cataloged) all the creatures on earth, God would return.

From Genesis 2

"And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof."

The first direction given by God to mankind was to name all the creatures of the earth. Once mankind finished that task, God returned. Good story, I hope the religiously insane don't get wind of this.