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! Leaping lemurs, sea creepies, a gecko in gay Paris

New species popping up all over the place!

From the treetops of Indochina and Sundaland will now be leaping three certifiably separate species of flying lemur, or "colugo." The colugos had been thought to comprise only two species, the Sunda colugo and the Philippine colugo. But upon comparison of DNA between Sunda colugos from mainland Indochina, Java, and Borneo, researches discovered each region had a unique species, having diverged as much as five million years ago.

Colugos glide using a membrane stretched between their appendages, like a flying squirrel. Apparently, their diversification "might be explained by the colugos' unusual way of getting around. While they have the most developed gliding membrane of any mammal, they are nearly helpless on the ground, leaving them incapable of crossing large open spaces that lack trees." Groups could easily have isolated themselves and had to settle down and speciate.

That's not to disparage these floating fellows, since they are the closest living group of mammals to ours, the primates.

Scientists from the seven year old Census of Marine Life met recently to discuss the 120,000 undersea species they'd documented thus far, including newly discovered blind lobsters, giant oysters, sea spiders the size of dinner plates, and the progenitor of many deep sea octopodes. Creepy pics, as usual, at Natty G.

Lastly, a new gecko with a dramatic tale, and the recently rediscovered pygmy tarsier from Indonesia, feared to be extinct since the 1920s.

Pics: Norman Lim, colugo; Sharon Gursky-Doyen, tarsier

New Species: Legless lizards, dwarf woodpeckers, and Neil Young

National Geographic bites my style this week with a photo gallery of newly discovered species in Brazil's Cerrado, a wooded grassland that's seen an increasing threat of urban and agricultural encroachment.

Most stories lead with the "legless lizard" discovered there, but we all know that that's just a snake. Among the fourteen new species found in the Cerrado are a tiny woodpecker, and a fat-tailed mouse opossum.

The discoveries, along with the documentation of several endangered species in the region, renewed a push by conservationists to develop a management plan for the area, according to MSNBC.

More important is a species of trapdoor spider, actually discovered in 2007, that has only just now been named - after Neil Young. The trapdoor spider is so named because it fashions a plug to cover the entrance of its burrow, and will wait under it to pounce at passing prey. Jason Bond named the spider Myrmekiaphila neilyoungi because he admires Young's music as well as his political activism.

New species: Weird creatures of the water

This weekly feature has been anything but. We will just have to see what fate it meets as Red Squirrel News Service grows.

Tricky choice this time around: a haul of bizarre sea creatures off Antarctica should end up yielding plenty of new species, but none have been formally described yet; and an "odd, flat-faced fish" found in Indonesia looks sure to be declared a new species.

The Antarctic haul brought creatures to the light of day that range from cute to gross to terrifying to surreal.

"Weird-fish expert" Ted Pietsch will call the odd Indonesian anglerfish the "Maluku frogfish" if it's a new species - and if he publishes it first. Like other anglerfish, it can use it's fins like feet, and makes its own lures for prey. The specimen that's been observed is about four inches, and is symmetrically, "psychedelically" striped.

What's interesting is its flat face. "We've never seen a fish with remotely this kind of face," said one of its discoverers. It could have humanlike binocular vision, which, for fish, "is extremely rare."

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

New species this week: Devil frog from hell

To celebrate the craziness of the animal kingdom, and because I have nothing better to do, I'll be picking a newly discovered species to highlight here each week on Friday.

The clear winner this week is Beelzebufo, "perhaps the largest frog ever to exist," according to the National Science Foundation. It lived 65 to 70 million years ago on what is now Madagascar and was "about the size of a beach ball." And with "an extremely wide mouth and powerful jaws," you would not have wanted to try and chase him around the pond.


Apart from the fact that the discovery may put the landmasses of Madagascar, India, and South America together as one in that time period, and apart from the titillating observation that Beelzebufo was likely "capable of killing lizards and other small vertebrates, perhaps even hatchling dinosaurs," most interesting are the monikers reporters have come up with for the big toad: "giant fossil frog from hell"; "Frogzilla"; "armored frog from hell"; and the tamer just plain "frog from hell". Well, the scientists that discovered the big bastard started it--their Latin name for it, Beelzebufo, means "devil frog".

The runners up this week include two new species of the fat, funny-shaped wobbegong (funny-named I might add) shark near Australia, and whatever's on three ships recently "returned from the Southern Ocean, their decks overflowing with a vast array of ocean life including a number of previously unknown species collected from the cold waters near the East Antarctic land mass." (Video here.)

Pic: SUNY-Stony Brook