Challenger completed 492 deep-sea soundings, 133 bottom dredges, 151 open-water trawls, and 263 serial water-temperature observations. Naturalists, an oceanographer, and other specialists turned these repeated operations into a systematic global dataset. The reported tally reached roughly 4,700 new species, including whole genera. Specimens and reports remain held by the Natural History Museum and can be consulted online. The surviving collection demonstrates both the expedition's productivity and how little deep-ocean life was known in the 1870s.
Chapter · 31:15-34:21
Soundings, dredges, and thousands of new species
The expedition's hundreds of soundings and sampling operations produced an extraordinary catalogue of new marine life.