Large volumes of morphological descriptions of whole organisms have been created as print or electronic text in a human-readable format. Converting the descriptions into computer- readable formats gives a new life to the valuable knowledge on biodiversity. Research in this area started 20 years ago, yet not sufficient progress has been made to produce an automated system that requires only minimal human intervention but works on descriptions of various plant and animal groups. This paper attempts to examine the hindering factors by identifying the mismatches between existing research and the characteristics of morphological descriptions.