The number of species of animals that have been described and are thus known to science is about one million. However, most biologists believe that the number of species that exist is many times the number that we have described and catalogued, but how many we don't know. Some suggest that there are ten million species of animals, others say a hundred million.

Scientists are asking the same question as you are: How many kinds of animals are there?

It's an exciting question among scientists these days, and we don't know the answer. Scientists are even arguing about how to count the animals. How do you know which squirrel is a different kind of animal and which one is just another of the same kind? Scientists thought they had good answers to these questions, but now we're getting new answers as we look at the animals genes and chromosomes and DNA.

I asked the guy in the next office, and he thinks there are about 1 million 2 hundred thousand [1,200,000] different kinds of animals,including insects, that have been named. We haven't discovered all the different kinds of animals yet, and maybe there are 12 million or even 30 million different kinds of animals total. Most of them are insects, so maybe there are about two hundred thousand [200,000] different kinds of animals that have been discovered.