The Darwin Tree of Life (DToL) challenge goals to sequence the genomes of all animals, fungi and plants present in Great Britain and Ireland—some 35,000 in complete. That is a colossal enterprise whose first section is nearly full. Speaking at a gathering of evolutionary biologists held in Beijing on July twenty third, Peter Holland of the University of Oxford instructed scientists that he and his colleagues had already collected practically 8,000 species. By December, he added, they hope to have sequenced 3,000 of them (the present rely is 2,034).