As human beings, we come across different and new people every day, this also goes for the animal species. Scientists and researchers come across new species of animals and plants almost every year. Therefore, we’ll be taking a look at newly discovered species in the world today.
From plants to animals, from aquatic animals to land, and so on, there are discoveries of new species by researchers and this is what makes nature a thing of beauty. Sometimes, these species have never been exercised by scientists before. And sometimes, it is just a case of subspecies given a very close look.
Sometimes, species are named after the area or region in which they were found or their characteristics. But as evident over the years, scientists like to play around a bit and name them after popular figures or celebrities. So let us delve right into the newly discovered species.
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What are Newly Discovered Species?
The idea of a species is one of the most important in biology. It is really important, then, that scientists have found it a tasking duty to stick with the term. One of the great minds in Charles Darwin wanted to abolish the idea altogether.
This is because he thought of it to be defining the indefinable.
The most common definition focuses on interbreeding, mentioning that newly discovered species are a group within which two people can breed to produce fertile offspring.
Why are they Called Newly Discovered Species?
As the term “newly discovered” goes, it is clear it is something that had not been found before. So, they are called newly discovered species because scientists have not come across them before or they are subspecies from a set that has not been thoroughly monitored. It is now a call for scientists to discover their behaviour and characteristics to confirm what they are.
15 Newly Discovered Species
1. Vampire Wasp, Peru:
A group of Finnish and American researchers mounted tent-like insect traps in a nature reserve outside “Iquitos”, a city in Peru. The traps caught quite a lot of insects, a lot of them were new species, and they were called vampire wasps.
One specimen is quite different from the entire set: a huge wasp that, when you look at it from the front, looks like an intersection between an old man with an untidy beard and the Predator. They published a paper on ZooKeys, whereby the scientists noted the insect as a new species of Darwin wasp, a different family scattered across the world.
2. Kem Kem Abelisaur, Morocco:
Researchers found two prehistoric bones from the secluded areas of phosphate mines in Morocco. The area that the bones were found in goes back to the time directly before an asteroid impacted the Earth and rendered the dinosaur species extinct.
The Unnamed abelisaurids, popularly known as Kem Kem Abelisaur, is a name from the past — 66 million years ago to be sure. The scientists, who were led by English paleontologist Nick Longrich, described the bones as belonging to an abelisaurid, the family that included North America’s Tyrannosaurus rex.
3. Nautilus spp, Oceania:
The Nautiloids are some of the oldest living animals on the planet. They were first discovered close to half a billion years ago. This was around the same time that the first plants left the sea to come on land. This animal is a subspecies of squid and octopi, but what sets them apart is that they live in the middle of a rock-hard-safe, outer shell.
The discovery was made by a team of marine biologists, who published a paper naming three new species of Nautilus found on reefs. This is off the coast of three different islands in Oceania: Vanuatu, American Samoa, and Viti Levu, Fiji. The new type of species closely doubled the number of living Nautilus species — from four to seven.
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4. DiCaprio’s snail-eating snake- Panama and Colombia:
DiCaprio’s snake that eats snails lives in trees. Scientists found five new snakes like it. They say it’s almost in danger because it lives in big, untouched forests. Even though some of its home is now farmland, the snake isn’t dying off too quickly to be called threatened.
The new animal lives in 16 spots in Panama and Colombia. Some of them are in a place in Colombia called the Cordillera Oriental. They live up high and look a little different. Scientists may discover they’re a different kind of animal after checking their genes more.
5. Giant Crab Spider, Ecuador:
In the dark of the Ecuadorian Amazon, insects on the ground aren’t safe. There’s a big spider with eight eyes, eight legs, and a fuzzy red belly waiting on a bush or tree. It’s ready to pounce on any insect it sees.
Pedro and Diego found a big crab spider while walking at night near the Tiputini Biodiversity Station in Ecuador.
6. A legless lizard – Angola:
A new species of legless lizard was discovered just slipping along the side of Serra da Neve, which is the second-tallest mountain in Angola. The Legless lizards, regarded as skinks, look like snakes, dodging between leaves on the forest floor to hunt for insects and other small prey.
Skinks are different from snakes because they have outer ear openings and movable eyelids, according to the Virginia Zoo. While the majority of skinks all have the same colour, the newly discovered Acontias mukwando has a pink ring around its neck.
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7. Stream treefrog (Hyloscirtus Tolkieni)- Ecuador:
Just a single individual of Hyloscirtus Tolkieni, a stream treefrog, has been found and captured, despite focused searches during the initial fieldwork. However, this one individual was enough for the authors of this paper to be able to describe it as a new species. This is because it was distinct enough in its morphology from other species in the Hyloscirtus genus.
With just one of them discovered so far, the known location of the species is limited to the place where it was discovered – the southern eastern slopes of the Cordillera Oriental. This is a chain of Andean mountains in the Río Negro-Sopladora National Park of Ecuador.
8. Puzzling plants- Durango, Mexico:
The discovery was made by Scientists from the National Polytechnic Institute in Durango, Mexico. They worked with Academy of Sciences researchers to study an uncommon lush in the Sierra Madre Occidental mountain range.
The plant germinated out of the side of cliffs, and it has long been known to the local O’dam community. The O’dam people describe the plant with bald leaves and stems as da’npakal, which means bald, naked, or slippery in their language.
9. Bent-toed gecko- Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste:
Scientists found a new kind of bent-toed gecko in Timor-Leste, one of the world’s newest countries. Timor-Leste is on the eastern side of Timor Island, part of the Lesser Sunda Islands.
The gecko was seen during the day in Lene Hara cave in Nino Konis Santana National Park, but catching it was hard for scientists.
They returned at night because bent-toed geckos are more active than and caught ten of them. Tests on their genes and how they look confirmed it was a new species.
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10. Gymnures- Philippines:
P. intermedia looks like a shrew with its golden-brown fur and pointed nose, but it’s a kind of mammal called a gymnure. Gymnures are also known as hairy hedgehogs or moonrats, and they’re close cousins of hedgehogs.
P. intermedia, along with other animals in the Podogymnura group, lives in the Philippines. It was found during a survey in the mountains of eastern Mindanao, where no one had looked for mammals before.
11. Nickel hyperaccumulator– Island of Borneo:
The “nickel hyperaccumulator” plant, called Rinorea niccolifera, is good at soaking up a lot of nickel, even up to 18,000 parts per million (ppm). People think this plant could be super helpful for green stuff because it can soak up metals so well.
It could be used to clean up dirty soil or water, and even help get metals out of the ground, which could help make industries cleaner and nicer for the environment.
12. Hypselostoma latispira masungiensis- Masungi Georeserve:
Scientists from the University of the Philippines Los Baños found a new kind of land snail in Rizal, a place many people visit for nature trips. They named it Hypselostoma latispira masungiensis. It took them three years of studying how the snail looks, and its genes and collecting lots of snails to figure out this new kind.
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13. helmet orchid – Province of Palawan:
A new type of plant was found only in the province, and it was discovered on mountains like Mt. Matalingahan, Mt. Bloomfield, Mt. Victoria, Sultan Peak, and Mt. Bahile. A team of plant scientists, including Danilo Tandang, Ulysses Ferreras, Annalee Hadsall, Stephanie Pym-Lyon, Alastair Robinson, and Rene Alfred Anton Bustamante, found it. They wrote about their discovery in an article on Biotaxa.org.
14. Gekko mizoramensis- South East Asia:
Parachute geckos are lizards that come out at night and live in trees. They have large flaps of skin around their head, body, legs, and tail. These flaps do two things. First, they help the geckos hide by getting rid of the shadows they make.
This helps them blend in when they’re sitting still on tree branches. Second, these flaps work like parachutes, letting the geckos glide from one tree to another.
15. Pitcher plant- Philippines:
A new plant species named Nepenthes cabanae was found in Mt. Malimumu, Pantaron range, Bukidnon Province, on Mindanao Island, Philippines. Scientists from Central Mindanao University, led by Dr. Noel Lagunday and Dr. Victor Amoroso, found it. Now, there are eight Nepenthes species in this area.
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Today’s newly discovered species are so much so that it will always continue. All these species are just a testament to the wonders of the earth and like we like to call it, God’s blessings on earth. From weird-looking animals to plants, many of them are still waiting to be discovered by the human race.
This is why researchers and scientists take a proper look and an extensive one to confirm that these species are safe to get close to and what they belong to. The newly discovered species are a thing of beauty and curiosity.
