Imagine you discover a new species and are trying to determine if it is a mammal. What are three things you would look for?
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Answer:
The naming of a new species is often taken to be a significant event in biology, much excitement in the media is devoted to the identification of a new species, but the truth is that it is mundane. Certainly some things are more rare than others (new mammals tick along at a rate far, far below that of new wasps for example) but the event itself is pretty commonplace. By the best estimates, biologists have identified something like two million unique species, which is quite a few by anyone's measure, but the total number is quite probably ten times that or more. Quite simply, it will probably take us another century or three to identify every species currently alive (though of course the rate of extinction is such that there are plenty we won't have to deal with as they will have died out before we even find out they ever existed).