atlas

His meticulous survey takes in dozens of sources, from the obscure to the well-known: pamphlets to legal codes, sermons to atlases, maps, travel narratives, even journals kept by ships’ captains.

Miraculously, they had found a dust-covered atlas hidden in some closet.

The atlas identifies nearly every cell type, records their genetic signatures, and shows how these cells grow and interact.

Three years later, their partnership has produced an unprecedented body of knowledge about hundreds of protist species and laid the groundwork for a "planetary atlas" of plankton.

They hold thousands of maps and atlases of everything from cave networks to mountain ranges to capital flows to the surface of the moon.