In the green corridors of Central Park and Prospect Park, scientists are quietly dismantling one of biology's most persistent assumptions: that undiscovered life belongs only to remote wilderness. Entomologist Emily Hartop and a multinational team are deploying DNA barcoding to search New York City's most visited parks for insect species unknown to science, drawing on the sobering reality that roughly 90% of Earth's estimated animal species have never been formally named. The work is less a search for the exotic than a reckoning with how little we know about the living world immediately around