This butterfly has a really funny mustache. So does this mean it looks more like Borat or Brad Pitt? Jokes aside, when the curators at the Natural History Museum in London noticed a butterfly with extra hair around its mouth, they took a closer look and discovered that it’s a new species.
The museum’s butterfly expert, Blanca Huertas, originally found the specimen four years ago on an expedition to the Magdalena valleys in Colombia. When she brought it back to the U.K., it promptly got lost in the museum’s three-million-and-change butterfly collection.
The good news is that she’s finally gotten around to classifying it: Huertas matched the butterfly to a reference species in the museum—a 90-year-old specimen known for having hairy mouthparts—and confirmed that it is a new species after all. It is now called Magdelena Valley Ringlet (or if you want to get all scientific, it’s also called Splendeuptychia ackeryl). But our nickname of Tom Selleck will do.
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Image: flickr/ Tom
A newly-discovered species of catfish can use its fins for more than swimming. From the top side, Lithogenes wahari looks like any other catfish, except with some extra body armor. But flip it over and you’ll see a giant sucking mouth and a pair of fleshy pelvic fins, which it uses to grasp and shimmy up slippery rocks in fast-flowing rivers.
Scientists first laid eyes on the strange fish 20 years ago in Venezuela. But the only specimen they had was in such bad condition that it “looked like it had been run over by a truck,” recalls researcher Scott Schaefer. It took years before the team was able to locate more of the species, which they found in abundance in a tributary of the Orinoco river. Capturing L. wahari was easy: the researchers easily picked 84 specimens off of rocks.
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Diamond rings can get lost on the beach or fall down the drain. For something that truly lasts forever, consider naming a new species of bat after your sweetheart—or yourself.
Purdue University is holding an auction, just in time for the holiday season, to name nine newly discovered species, including seven bats and two turtles. The funds raised will go towards funding studies of the new species and conserving their natural habitats.
First up on the block is a real gem: the world’s tiniest bat. The little yellow creature is found from Mexico to Brazil and weighs less than a teaspoon of water. John Bickham, who helped discover the new species, explains the prize as follows: “The species name would look like: Rhogeessa (your name here). And fitting with the scientific protocols and the Latin descriptions for the genus and species, we would add an ‘i’ to the person’s name.”
Although the honor of naming a new species traditionally goes to the discoverer, Bickham is donating that right to the auction. In case you’re not sold yet, Bickham notes that bats make up nearly one-fourth of all mammals and they play essential roles as pollinators, seed dispersers, and pest controllers. The winning bidder will also get the chance to travel on a scientific expedition with the research team.
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At least one species of proboscidean, a prehistoric relative of the elephant, lived in an aquatic environment, according to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The extinct water-lover, which belonged to the genus Moeritherium and lived around 37 million years ago, appears to have munched on freshwater plants and spent most of its days in swamps or river systems, according to Alexander Liu, an earth sciences expert at the University of Oxford and the lead author of the study. (more…)
Researchers in Singapore say they have discovered a frog that has no lungs. Called the “Barbourula kalimantanensis,” the aquatic frog appears to do all of its breathing entirely through its skin. The frog’s shape—a highly flattened body that maximizes the surface area of its skin—allows it to absorb all necessary oxygen in its habitat, which is made up of cold, fast-flowing water.
David Bickford of the National University of Singapore, who found the frog during an expedition in Borneo, reportedly called complete lunglessness a “particularly rare evolutionary event that has probably only occurred three times.” The only other four-legged animals known to have no lungs are certain salamanders and one species of caecilian, “a limbless amphibian resembling an earthworm.” (more…)
