Meet the New Species

From old-world primates to patch-nosed salamanders, new creatures are being discovered every day

  • By Richard Conniff
  • Smithsonian magazine, August 2010, Subscribe
View More Photos »
kipunji The discovery of new species is driven by new technologies, targeted surveys of little-studied ecosystems and a determined effort to identify plants and animals before their habitat is lost. The kipunji is one of 300 mammal species discovered in the past decade; it is thought to be Africa’s rarest monkey.

Tim Davenport / WCS

 

Article Tools

 
  • Comments (7)
  • Font
    		•
  • Email
    		•
  • RSS
    		•
  • Print
    		•
  • Single Page
    		•

    Photo Gallery

    Meet the New Species

    Explore more photos from the story


    Interactive

    Match the Species Game

    Can you match the name of the newly discovered species to a photograph of the plant or animal?


    Related Links

    Census of Marine Life

    More from Smithsonian.com

    One morning a few years ago, on a forested slope 6,200 feet above sea level in southwestern Tanzania, a team of wildlife researchers was tracking down reports about a strange primate. The scientists suspected that the animal, known to local hunters as kipunji, would turn out to be imaginary. Then someone yelled “Kipunji!” and everyone turned to gawk at what biologist Tim Davenport of the Wildlife Conservation Society described afterward as “the most bizarre monkey I had ever seen.” It was about three feet tall, with a thick fur coat and brownish-gray hair fanned out around its black muzzle like a Victorian gentleman’s cheek whiskers. “Bloody hell!” said Davenport. “That’s got to be a new species.”

    It was of course astonishing for a large primate to be discovered in the 21st century in a heavily populated corner of East Africa, where human beings have been kicking around for as long as we have been human. (Scientists now know it as Rungwecebus kipunji—the monkey from around Mount Rungwe called kipunji—and think about 1,100 of the animals survive there.) But the truth is that big, colorful, even spectacular, new species seem to be turning up everywhere these days. We are living in what some naturalists have dubbed “a new age of discovery.” The number of species being found today “compares favorably with any time since the mid-1700s”—that is, since the beginning of scientific classification—according to Michael Donoghue of Yale University and William Alverson of Chicago’s Field Museum. These new species, they write, may be weird enough to induce the same “sense of awe, amusement, and even befuddlement that remarkable new organisms inspired during the last great age of discovery” from the 15th through the 19th centuries.

    Conventional wisdom says such discoveries should not be happening now. But conventional wisdom always acts as if everything worth knowing is already known and as if all the good stuff has long since been discovered. The great French anatomist Georges Cuvier thought so as early as 1812, discounting the likelihood of “discovering new species of the larger quadrupeds” in the modern world. Then explorers discovered the gorilla, the okapi, the pygmy hippo, the giant panda and the Komodo dragon, among many others.

    Nature, the scientific journal, pointed out in 1993 that although one might expect newfound species to be limited to “obscure microbes and insects,” scientists in Vietnam had just discovered a bovine. Then others discovered a striped rabbit in the Mekong Delta and a gaudy Indonesian fish that swims by bouncing haphazardly off the sea bottom.

    Such novelties will turn up for years to come. Scientists estimate the total number of plant and animal species in the world at 10 million to 50 million—but they have so far described only about 1.9 million. (The standard definition of a species is a population of organisms that breed together over time and stay separate from other populations.) Even within our own class, mammals, roughly 300 new species have been discovered in the first decade of this century—mostly rodents, but also marsupials, a beaked whale and a slew of primates. Researchers recently estimated that the total mammal species count will rise from about 5,500 now to 7,500 by mid-century. “And 10,000 wouldn’t be a stretch,” says Kristofer Helgen, a mammalogist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, who has discovered roughly 100 new species.

    Why now? New roads and rapid deforestation are opening up habitats once too remote to explore. Researchers sometimes discover new species just as hunting, farming and other pressures are pushing them to extinction. In addition, helicopters, satellite mapping, submersibles, deep-sea cameras and other modern tools help scientists methodically search understudied areas—including spots where wars or political barriers once kept them out.

    A heightened sense of urgency about the threat of extinction has also encouraged international cooperation, sometimes on a global scale. For instance, the ten-year-long, 80-plus-nation Census of Marine Life will have discovered thousands of previously undescribed species—from a yeti crab to a giant spiny lobster—by the time it wraps up later this year.

    Most future discoveries, says ornithologist Bruce Beehler of Conservation International, will probably come from remote areas with lots of variation in habitat—for instance, where a mountain range meets a river basin. In such terrain populations of organisms tend to get separated from one another and develop adaptations to survive in their new territory. Beehler says to expect discoveries from the eastern slope of the Andes in South America, the Congo basin in West Africa and the eastern Himalayas in Asia. On a 2005 helicopter expedition in New Guinea, he and Helgen discovered an entire “lost world” of new species deep in the Foja Mountains; after two return visits, the team has cataloged more than 70 new species, including a type of wallaby and a gecko. They now have their eyes on another mountainous area of western New Guinea they call “the Bird’s Neck.” They just need to figure out how to get there.


    One morning a few years ago, on a forested slope 6,200 feet above sea level in southwestern Tanzania, a team of wildlife researchers was tracking down reports about a strange primate. The scientists suspected that the animal, known to local hunters as kipunji, would turn out to be imaginary. Then someone yelled “Kipunji!” and everyone turned to gawk at what biologist Tim Davenport of the Wildlife Conservation Society described afterward as “the most bizarre monkey I had ever seen.” It was about three feet tall, with a thick fur coat and brownish-gray hair fanned out around its black muzzle like a Victorian gentleman’s cheek whiskers. “Bloody hell!” said Davenport. “That’s got to be a new species.”

    It was of course astonishing for a large primate to be discovered in the 21st century in a heavily populated corner of East Africa, where human beings have been kicking around for as long as we have been human. (Scientists now know it as Rungwecebus kipunji—the monkey from around Mount Rungwe called kipunji—and think about 1,100 of the animals survive there.) But the truth is that big, colorful, even spectacular, new species seem to be turning up everywhere these days. We are living in what some naturalists have dubbed “a new age of discovery.” The number of species being found today “compares favorably with any time since the mid-1700s”—that is, since the beginning of scientific classification—according to Michael Donoghue of Yale University and William Alverson of Chicago’s Field Museum. These new species, they write, may be weird enough to induce the same “sense of awe, amusement, and even befuddlement that remarkable new organisms inspired during the last great age of discovery” from the 15th through the 19th centuries.

    Conventional wisdom says such discoveries should not be happening now. But conventional wisdom always acts as if everything worth knowing is already known and as if all the good stuff has long since been discovered. The great French anatomist Georges Cuvier thought so as early as 1812, discounting the likelihood of “discovering new species of the larger quadrupeds” in the modern world. Then explorers discovered the gorilla, the okapi, the pygmy hippo, the giant panda and the Komodo dragon, among many others.

    Nature, the scientific journal, pointed out in 1993 that although one might expect newfound species to be limited to “obscure microbes and insects,” scientists in Vietnam had just discovered a bovine. Then others discovered a striped rabbit in the Mekong Delta and a gaudy Indonesian fish that swims by bouncing haphazardly off the sea bottom.

    Such novelties will turn up for years to come. Scientists estimate the total number of plant and animal species in the world at 10 million to 50 million—but they have so far described only about 1.9 million. (The standard definition of a species is a population of organisms that breed together over time and stay separate from other populations.) Even within our own class, mammals, roughly 300 new species have been discovered in the first decade of this century—mostly rodents, but also marsupials, a beaked whale and a slew of primates. Researchers recently estimated that the total mammal species count will rise from about 5,500 now to 7,500 by mid-century. “And 10,000 wouldn’t be a stretch,” says Kristofer Helgen, a mammalogist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, who has discovered roughly 100 new species.

    Why now? New roads and rapid deforestation are opening up habitats once too remote to explore. Researchers sometimes discover new species just as hunting, farming and other pressures are pushing them to extinction. In addition, helicopters, satellite mapping, submersibles, deep-sea cameras and other modern tools help scientists methodically search understudied areas—including spots where wars or political barriers once kept them out.

    A heightened sense of urgency about the threat of extinction has also encouraged international cooperation, sometimes on a global scale. For instance, the ten-year-long, 80-plus-nation Census of Marine Life will have discovered thousands of previously undescribed species—from a yeti crab to a giant spiny lobster—by the time it wraps up later this year.

    Most future discoveries, says ornithologist Bruce Beehler of Conservation International, will probably come from remote areas with lots of variation in habitat—for instance, where a mountain range meets a river basin. In such terrain populations of organisms tend to get separated from one another and develop adaptations to survive in their new territory. Beehler says to expect discoveries from the eastern slope of the Andes in South America, the Congo basin in West Africa and the eastern Himalayas in Asia. On a 2005 helicopter expedition in New Guinea, he and Helgen discovered an entire “lost world” of new species deep in the Foja Mountains; after two return visits, the team has cataloged more than 70 new species, including a type of wallaby and a gecko. They now have their eyes on another mountainous area of western New Guinea they call “the Bird’s Neck.” They just need to figure out how to get there.

    But new species also turn up in less exotic places—a slender salamander 30 miles from Los Angeles, or a new genus of tree that grows up to 130 feet tall two hours from Sydney, Australia. And Helgen notes that two out of three new mammal species are discovered in museum collection cabinets.

    That’s partly because genetic analysis is revealing “cryptic species,” creatures that look alike to us but not to each other. For instance, scientists now believe that giraffes, currently classified as a single species, really belong to six or more species, some of which might not have bred together in the wild for more than a million years. Likewise, researchers recently took a closer look at a bat that ranges across much of South America and found genetic evidence suggesting that some identical-looking bats are different species. Such genetic differences can open the eyes of field biologists to previously unsuspected traits. “Maybe it’s scent, a sound, a pheromone, something that doesn’t get preserved in a museum,” says Elizabeth Clare of the University of Guelph in Ontario, a co-author of the bat study.

    Why should we care? If you’ve seen one look-alike bat, or rat, or parasitic wasp, haven’t you seen them all? In fact, our own lives sometimes depend on recognizing the subtle differences. For instance, South American night monkeys of the genus Aotus used to be regarded as a single species. Then a primatologist found that they really belong to nine separate species that differ in their susceptibility to malaria. That mattered because scientists relied on Aotus as a laboratory animal for malaria studies—and did not realize they could be getting bogus results, and putting human lives in peril, by inadvertently testing malaria treatments on a species that might not be vulnerable to the disease in the first place.

    But what really drives scientists to the far ends of the earth in search of new species is something far less pragmatic. Visiting New Caledonia as a young man, the evolutionist and ant taxonomist E. O. Wilson realized that “not just the ants but everything I saw, every species of plant and animal, was new to me.” Years later, the memory made him confess: “I am a neophile, an inordinate lover of the new, of diversity for its own sake.” His greatest desire was to live in a place “teeming with new life forms,” wrote Wilson, now 81. All he wanted was “not years but centuries of time” to take its measure.

    Richard Conniff’s The Species Seekers will be out this fall.


    1 2 Next »

        Subscribe now for more of Smithsonian's coverage on history, science and nature.



    Additional Sources

    “The Critically Endangered kipunji Rungwecebus kipunji of southern Tanzania: first census and conservation status assessment” by Tim R.B. Davenport et al., Oryx, 42 (3), 352-359


    Digg
     
    Comments (7)

    I have discovered 2 species that nobody knows about, if i would expose this new discovery, would i get paid? & how much? i have seen it & i know exactly where they live, i have lived in my country all my life & i pretty well know it inside out until i discovered something that is not recorded yet, if someone can contact me on my facebook, let me know because no one knows anything about these species, i am telling the truth & God knows as my witness, i would like to know as soon as possible, i will wait, contact me & you better be someone i can trust, thank-q

    Posted by Bernie Uluadluak on July 19,2011 | 03:45 PM

    Pardon me if I've forgotten my biology, but just because two species can mate and produce offspring doesn't automatically mean they're from the same species. In cases where two species mate and produce only offspring unable to produce offspring of their own, doesn't that indicate that, at some level, there is a significant enough difference in DNA?

    I'm no taxonomy expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I've always been amazed by the lack of credibility of that field. Between so-called "scientific" names littered with the names of those who discovered the wee critter (rather than words that would provide some insight into the uniqueness of the creature, as should be done), their loved ones or some other nomenclature that is completely irrelevant to anything other than ego, and the push-pull war of splitters and lumpers, neither who seem to have got it quite right, the field is a shambles. Maybe that is why there's no money in it?

    Why must there be so much antagonism between the two groups. Both should just admit to being partially wrong, suck it up and work together.

    Posted by Glenn McGrew on November 2,2010 | 06:46 AM

    Thanks for making us aware that we know ever so little about what's in our world. My wife and I were really interested in the photos - I wish there'd been more! Being that my wife is Indonesian, she exhibited curious pride about discoveries here.

    Posted by Glenn McGrew on November 2,2010 | 06:34 AM

    Wow, three intelligent, well-reasoned, articulate comments in a row, all of which I disagree with. But wow!

    This is why I love Smithsonian, other readers also seem to be thinking about the same things I do -- and we don't necessarily think alike.

    Posted by Joyce Melton on July 17,2010 | 01:26 AM

    I have always been for the advancement of knowledge, but when a name changes, and within a decade reverts back to the previous nomenclature, field practitioners simply throw up their arms and say, what, again??!

    Why are there fewer taxonomists? Because there is no money it. Very few people get paid to do classification. All the big bucks go to universities for genetic research today. Natural history has taken a back seat.

    I don't have a problem with the species concept changing. Yet when only "portions" of a cell are used to eliminate entire families, that's just nuts. This is what's happening in the plant world. It would seem that if part of a blueberry cell matches ANY part of a watermelon cell, guess what, that blueberry is now called a watermelon. All other morphological traits are simply ignored. Thems the rules now. Let's see what ALL the DNA says before we throw things aside.

    I get tired of hearing on TV or in magazines "genetic evidence shows". Shows what? Tell us! This is the part I want to hear about. Get out of your labs and educate the world on "how" we know this to be true. Then again, I guess gene splicing makes for bad television. Just remember, most people don't sit around reading journals.

    Posted by Dennis Profant on July 13,2010 | 02:42 AM

    I agree with Frank in the preceeding post. Taxonomy is a mess, and may I add, a field in dire need of new practioners.

    As a PhD student studying population monitoring, taxonomy and participatory science (citizen science) with regards to New England pollinators (bees)it has become very apparent to me and my colleagues that there is a bottle neck at taxonomy.

    It is wonderful to discover new species in far away lands, but mind-boggling to me that there are so few local experts, professional and/or hobbyists, who know the bees in their own backyards. Though the National Science Foundation is funding a large effort to train new taxonomists and taxonomic research (PEET) the National Academies of Science states "The rate at which species are becoming extinct appears to exceed the rate at which new specimemens are described."

    Posted by Peggy Eppig on July 8,2010 | 09:46 AM

    Taxonomy is a mess these days. The field divides into two mutually antagonistic groups: lumpers and splitters. I admit to being a lumper. The author of this article is clearly a splitter.

    What exactly does susceptibility to malaria have to do with speciation? The hypothesis that two populations are different species is testable. Can they mate successfully and produce fertile offspring? If they can, the populations belong to the same species. Even if they don't mate, they still might be members of the same species.

    Test the authors hypothesis by asking how it would play out if applied to the naked apes. Are naked apes living in Eurasia a different species than naked apes living in the Americans? For 10,000 years they had no contact. When they met again, they recognized each other as potential mates, and there was no biological impediment to producing viable young. How about naked apes with pink skin and naked apes with black skin living in major cities in North America? Segregated mating patterns are more consistent with the color variations being separate species and any interbreeding producing rare hybrids. Just because they don't mate, doesn't mean they can't. Naked apes are all one species regardless of skin color. A female naked ape raised in a family who listens to music of Beethoven and Bach might not be charmed by a boy who comes from a family who listens to the Beatles and the Beastie Boys. That does not mean they are different species just because his song does not sexually attract her.

    The domestic dog has a Latinized species name differentiating it from the gray wolf. Yet a generic dog can mate successfully with wolves it encounters. The domestic cat is not a real species either, despite its Latin name.

    Be wary of any claim that some newly discovered population is a new species. Lumpers of the world unite! The world needs you.

    Posted by Frank Weigert on July 1,2010 | 07:31 AM

    Post a Comment


    Name: (required)

    Email: (required)

    Comment:

    Comments are moderated, and will not appear until Smithsonian.com has approved them. Smithsonian reserves the right not to post any comments that are unlawful, threatening, offensive, defamatory, invasive of a person's privacy, inappropriate, confidential or proprietary, political messages, product endorsements, or other content that might otherwise violate any laws or policies.



    Advertisement


    Advertisement

    Follow Us






    First Name
    Last Name
    Address 1
    Address 2
    City
    State   Zip
    Email

    Smithsonian Store

    Smithsonian Journeys