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Top Ten New Species |
News Archive
Every spring the International Institute for Species Exploration at Arizona State University releases a list of the Top Ten New Species that were discovered the previous year. On May 22, 2009, the Institute published its edition for 2008.
Experts from all over the world worked together to determine which species discovered last year had the greatest impact on the scientific community. Some species were included on the list because of their size, from the Indonesian seahorse that is only half an inch long or the snake in Barbados that is four inches long, to the Malaysian stick insect that has a body length of fourteen inches (and is now the biggest known insect in existence)! Malaysia also gave us a new species of snail whose shell curves four different ways.
Two species were included because they were discovered in unexpected places, like the new species of slug that was found in a highly-populated urban area of Wales, or the bacteria that was discovered by Japanese scientists in cans of hairspray. Others were noted for their rarity, such as the naturally decaffeinated coffee bean found in Cameroon or the species of palm in Madagascar which currently has less than 100 living specimens.
The last two entries were found in the sea; a species of damselfish was found off the coast of the Palau islands and was the first new species registered in 2008. Finally, a 380 million year old fossil was found off the coast of Australia that showed one of the earliest documented live births by a vertebrate — the scientist who discovered the fossil nicknamed it "Josie" after his own mother!
Discovering new species allows us to learn more about our world and, since we're finding new ones every day, we obviously still have a lot to learn!
Experts from all over the world worked together to determine which species discovered last year had the greatest impact on the scientific community. Some species were included on the list because of their size, from the Indonesian seahorse that is only half an inch long or the snake in Barbados that is four inches long, to the Malaysian stick insect that has a body length of fourteen inches (and is now the biggest known insect in existence)! Malaysia also gave us a new species of snail whose shell curves four different ways.
Two species were included because they were discovered in unexpected places, like the new species of slug that was found in a highly-populated urban area of Wales, or the bacteria that was discovered by Japanese scientists in cans of hairspray. Others were noted for their rarity, such as the naturally decaffeinated coffee bean found in Cameroon or the species of palm in Madagascar which currently has less than 100 living specimens.
The last two entries were found in the sea; a species of damselfish was found off the coast of the Palau islands and was the first new species registered in 2008. Finally, a 380 million year old fossil was found off the coast of Australia that showed one of the earliest documented live births by a vertebrate — the scientist who discovered the fossil nicknamed it "Josie" after his own mother!
Discovering new species allows us to learn more about our world and, since we're finding new ones every day, we obviously still have a lot to learn!
The list is released each spring to commemorate the birthday of a man named Carl Linnaeus, a scientist who was born on May 13, 1707 and is thought to be one of the fathers of modern ecology (the study of organisms and their environment). He is most famous for creating a system for naming and organizing species that scientist still use to this very day; experts guess that there are between 2 million and 10 million species on Earth, and only 1.8 million of them have been discovered since Dr. Linnaeus began naming species in 1758!