A species description or type description is a formal description of a newly discovered species, usually in the form of a scientific paper. Its purpose is to give a clear description of a new species of organism and explain how it differs from species which have been described previously, or are related. The species description also contains photographs or other illustrations of the type material and explains in which museums the holotype (and other types such as paratypes) have been deposited. The publication in which the species is described gives the new species a formal scientific name. Today, some 1.9 million species have been discovered and named and some 8.7 million may actually exist on Earth.[1]
A team of researchers at Penn State University has identified 24 new species of skinks, a subspecies of lizards, native to the Caribbean Islands, turning the region’s fauna from one of the smallest lizard groups in the world to one of the largest. However, half of these new species are considered already extinct or very [...]
Svante Paabo, the researcher whose work provided the basis for the Jurassic Park movies seems to have struck gold once again; this time it’s about a finger bone older than 30.000 years, found in the Altai mountains, that as far as DNA analysis has shown, belongs to no known species of humans. They also found [...]
This amazing snailfish is just one of the animals new to science that have been uncovered by Oceanlab scientists; the expedition was studying one of the world’s deepest trenches, an environment thought to be void of fish of any kind, but researchers were surprised to find out that even the bottom of the trench was [...]
It’s always nice when new species are discovered, and this time it was an expedition from Papua New Guinea that made the discovery. A frog no bigger than a peanut, a brilliant green katydid with bright pink eyes and a white tipped tail mouse are the stars of the over 200 newly discovered species. The [...]
Tue, May 1, 2012
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