“Space comes to mind as the last frontier for finding new forms of life, but we still have not explored all of the planet on which we are living. Biologists venture to places both extreme and mundane in the quest to learn more about Earth. Courtesy of the DOE Joint Genome Institute, here is a photo tour of what life is like for these scientists as they travel the world, a trip which resulted in 29 new branches on the tree of life.”
To learn more about the microbial dark matter project, go to http://archive.jgi.doe.gov/boldly-illuminating-biologys-dark-matter/
See the full photo essay on TreeHugger.