Newly Discovered: Previously Unknown Animal Species (Not Alleged Cryptids Or Species Believed Extinct)

[michael59]

Scientists discover new species of mysterious isopod deep-sea creature.​

Scientists identified a new species of giant isopod crustaceans that live in the deepest parts of the ocean, called Bathynomus yucatanensis, a new study published on Wednesday detailed.

https://www.jpost.com/science/article-714162

Uh-oh. It looks like it would taste good. Hope I am wrong.

 

[Nemo]

‘These kids can find anything’: California teens identify two new scorpion species.

The students traveled to salt lakes to collect specimens of unknown arachnids living in the harsh environment

A pair of California scorpion species that may have crawled under the radar for tens of thousands of years have finally been exposed – thanks to the efforts of two Bay Area teenagers. And for one at-risk species, the students’ work could prove life-saving.
Prakrit Jain of Los Altos and Harper Forbes of Sunnyvale, 17 and 18 at the time, identified two new species – Paruroctonus soda and Paruroctonus conclusus – after a tip from social media and excursions into the harsh terrain the arachnids inhabit, aided by a black light and Jain’s mother’s car.

It began when Jain and Forbes – who met while working at a nature preserve – spotted the unidentified scorpions on iNaturalist, a social network that allows people to share their observations of the natural world. Users all over the world can upload photos of organisms they’ve spotted and others with expertise in the area can identify them, Forbes explained.
With about 115m observations recorded on the platform, “the real benefit of this for people doing research is that it allows such an enormous amount of data to be present to anybody,” Jain says – data it would “take thousands of people many lifetimes to gather on their own”.

Jain and Forbes have been interested in ecology and wildlife “pretty much our whole lives”, Jain says.

“These kids can find anything,” says Lauren Esposito, an arachnologist at the California Academy of Sciences who collaborated with Jain and Forbes. “You set them out in a landscape and they’re like: ‘Here’s every species of snake, here’s every scorpion, every butterfly,’ and it’s kind of incredible.”

The students check iNaturalist regularly, “seeing if there’s anything that catches our eye”. Unidentified species frequently appear on the platform, but these two examples caught their attention in part because of their small range. They were “geographically isolated”, Forbes says, living around what Esposito describes as salt lakes, or alkali flats – “a former lake from the glacial era, 10,000 years ago, that’s dried out over time”, leaving a brutal desert environment.

(C) The Gaurdian. '22.

 

[ramonmercado]

Scientists in Ecuador have discovered six new species of rain frog.

The new species were all found on the eastern slopes of the Ecuadorean Andes, in two national parks. But the scientists who discovered them have warned that all six Pristimantis species were found within a 20km-radius of deforested areas. They recommended that they all be added to the International Union for Conservation of Nature's (IUCN) red list of threatened species.

There is a huge diversity of Pristimantis frogs with more than 550 different species living in areas ranging from eastern Honduras through the Andes to northern Argentina and Brazil. Colombia and Ecuador have the biggest wealth of species of these little land-dwelling frogs and scientists think there are many more species yet to be discovered.

This latest discovery was made by Ecuadorean herpetologists Jhael Ortega, Jorge Brito and Santiago Ron.

Mr Ron explained in a tweet that they had decided to name one of the species resistencia (resistance) in honour of all the environmental activists killed in Latin America.

According to a report by advocacy group Global Witness, more environmentalists were killed in Latin America than any other region in the world last year.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-63386174

 

[kamalktk]

"Researchers in Australia have made a big discovery: a super-sized species of trapdoor spider found only in Central Queensland."

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/worl...rW?cvid=758f2238abb34600a29d1e97057a8292&ei=9

 

[ramonmercado]

A big find even if it is a little fish.

It is five centimeters long, but larger than all its relatives: Microichthys grandis, literally "big little fish."

Researchers from the State Museum of Natural History Stuttgart in Germany and Wageningen Marine Research (WMR) in the Netherlands discovered this new fish species during a survey off the Irish coast last year. This finding in the Northeast Atlantic is something special for the scientists and has now been published in the journal Ichthyological Research.

Researcher Bram Couperus of WMR is pleasantly surprised by the spontaneous discovery: "Discovering a new fish species in the Northeast Atlantic is a rare event. It has not occurred before in the history of our institute, founded in the 1950s. This fish was caught in an area where there is a lot of fishing, especially by Dutch fishers. One would therefore expect the species to have been caught before. If this is the case, at least it escaped attention—until last year." ...

For the Wageningen researchers, the search for the fish's identity led via a Russian taxonomist to the State Museum of Natural History Stuttgart in Germany, where the fish taxonomist Ronald Fricke already had experience with this group of fish, the deepwater cardinalfishes (Epigonidae).

Fricke notes, "Deepwater cardinalfishes of the genus Microichthys are known from three other species that live in the Mediterranean Sea and eastern Atlantic. They are free-swimming in deep water and only a handful of specimens is known to science. The discovery of the new species off Ireland is very exciting, as it seems closer related to a Mediterranean species from Sicily, than to the other Atlantic species from the Azores." ...

https://phys.org/news/2023-04-fish-species-deep-sea-ireland.html

 

[ramonmercado]

Two new bad butterfly species!

Scientists have named a new group of butterflies after the villain Sauron from the Lord of the Rings novels.

Experts hit on the name Saurona because the black rings on the insect's orange wings reminded them of the all-seeing eye described in JRR Tolkien's books. The Natural History Museum in London hopes the unusual title will draw attention to the species and help generate more research. Two species of butterfly have been added to the newly named Saurona genus. Saurona triangular and Saurona aurigera are the inaugural members of the group but it's expected many more species will join them.

The name was picked by Dr Blanca Heurtas, curator of the butterflies at the museum, who is part of an international team who described the new genus in a paper published in the scientific journal Systematic Entomology.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-65515790