New Species: Your name here

Ain't found nothin since the last post. Probably something or other long extinct, some kind of bacteria, etc. But here's the really exciting news.

"Starting Monday," reports the Chicago Tribune, "Purdue University researchers will be auctioning off the naming rights to seven recently discovered types of bats hailing from Mexico, South America, Central America and Africa. And if the bats seem too 'last Christmas,' there's also a pair of yet-to-be-named Amazonian turtles up for grabs."

Indeed, "universities and ecological organizations across the country have begun to view the naming rights to new species of birds, bugs and mammals as a way to draw big bucks to fund their research."

Stephen Colbert already caught onto this I guess and made some good sarcastic self-conscious jokes about it. Feigning indignity at the naming of a trapdoor spider after Neil Young, he had the biologist fan who named it on the show for what I'm sure was a snippy chiding. He then proceeded to have a trapdoor spider named after him, no joke: Aptostichus stephencolberti.



John Bickham, Purdue professor who discovered the as yet unnamed bats, "said there are about 1.6 million known species of organisms, estimated to be only 10 percent of what exists on the Earth."

"'We're losing species every minute,' he said. 'People don't really understand the full impact of this. We're really talking about losing the organisms that may be necessary to sustain the foundation on which the Earth is built. And yet we don't even really understand them.'"

New species this week: Big loud bats, long extinct

One of six new bat species recovered from fossils in Egypt may be the largest echolocating bat known to the animal kingdom. The species lived about 35 million years ago, and their discovery in Africa raises questions about the origin of their family.

Echolocating bats are called microbats, in contrast to the megabats which use smell to hunt, are on average larger, and comprise the fruit bats. The largest of the new species - whose names are as yet unreleased - could have had a two foot wingspan, while the largest megabat measures three feet across.

This vocal vespertilian would have been "loud" and "obnoxious" according to the study's lead scientist. "Just going by the large echolocating bats that I know that live today," he said, "many are very loud and very pushy and very boisterous...I am assuming these bats would have been, too."

It was hard choosing these long dead "boisterous bats" for the Species of the Week, especially with the discovery recently of a "thumb-sized" lemur-like monkey that lived even longer ago and ties extant primates for the title of smallest. The only living new species discovered recently was a Microbacterium that can live in hairspray, watch out!

Image: Bonnie Miljour