10. The Carnivorous Olinguito
Mark Gurney / Smithsonian
If you think it’s hard to tell a chimpanzee from a bonobo, try
distinguishing the new, carnivorous olinguito from all other
olinguitos—tree-dwelling mammals of the
Amazon
cloud forest related to common raccoons. So closely does the
reddish-brown animal with its deceptively cuddly appearance and its
decidedly un-cuddly claws resemble its already identified cousins, that
the preserved samples of the animal’s pelts which were long stored in
U.S. museums were consistently mislabeled as common olinguitos. The
Smithsonian Institution even reports that some of the
animals
may have been kept in American zoos in the 1960s, raising suspicion
only because they never seemed to mate—at least not successfully—with
others of their ostensible kind. But in 2013, the Smithsonian’s curator
of mammals announced both anatomical and genetic evidence that
conclusively carved out a new species. Not only does this earn the
animals an entry in the taxonomy books, it may at last get the captive
ones a cage with the right kind of mate. Happy trails you nocturnal
imps, you.
9. Giant Amazon Freshwater Arapaima
Paulo Whitaker / Reuters
For every animal family that has hundreds of species, there are
others that have only a few—or even just one. That was the case with the
sleek, silvery, 7. ft. (2.1 m) Amazon fish known as the araipama, a
favorite source of protein for local fishermen. In the middle of the 19
th
century, taxonomists thought they had identified four species, but by
the 1860s, the differences among them were seen as trivial enough that
they were collapsed back into a single one. Modern-day biologist Donald
Stewart of the State University of New York looked more closely at
specimens of the fish as well as at the old research and decided that
nope, the first guess—four species—was correct. And in 2013, he
identified a fifth one, physically distinguished from the others by only
a few subtle features, including slightly different coloration and an
elongated sinus cavity. The formal designation of the new species is
less important than the problems it potentially poses. Araipama are now
being raised and farmed, and farmed fish have a tendency to escape and
become wild fish, sometimes crowding out native species they wouldn’t
normally encounter. Stewart recommends caution in any more farming of
arapaima until their species and behaviors can be better understood.
8. The Cape Melville Shade Skink
Conrad Hoskin / AFP / Getty Images
Australia was
generous with the exotic animals this year, offering up the wonderfully
named Cape Melville Shade Skink, a gold-colored, insect-eating lizard,
which represents one more skink species in a family that already
includes 1,500 others. But the Cape Melville entry is special, not only
for its fetching color, but for its exuberance. Mot skinks stay close to
the ground, hunting their buggy prey among the leaf litter. The Cape
Melville skink leaps about on rock-and-moss fields. That’s usually a
good way to get yourself eaten, but this species must know what it’s
doing: it’s been around for about half a billion years.
7. Leaf-Tailed Gecko
Conrad Hoskin / Reuters
You probably wouldn’t want to be 8 inches long, have a tail shaped
like a leaf and no eyelids to speak of, requiring you to lick your
eyeballs clean every now and again. But if you were, you’d have been
famous this year, because you’d be the
Saltuarius eximius, the newest member of the leaf-tailed gecko family, discovered in northern Australia.
Saltuarius is
a hanger-on from an ancient era, dating back to the time 510 million
years ago when Australia was part of a larger southern landmass known as
Gondwana. The proto-continent is long gone, but some of its earliest
inhabitants apparently remain and the rock-toned exquisitely camouflaged
Saltuarius is one of the nicest. Patrick Couper, curator of
reptiles and frogs at Queensland Museum, called the new critter, “the
strangest new species to come across my desk in 26 years working as a
professional herpetologist.” High praise from a scientist who clearly
knows.
6. The Carolina Hammerhead
William Driggers
To answer the question you may or may not have been asking but have
every right to ask: No, there is no animal uglier than a hammerhead
shark. Seriously, what’s that head all about? Well, make room for one
more—the
Sphyrna gilbert, a new species of hammerhead shark that
measures 10 to 13 ft. (3 to 4 m) fully grown, and has the one advantage
of not being terribly aggressive. The species, informally known as the
Carolina hammerhead after the U.S. coastal waters in which it was found,
took some study, since it looks so similar to its cousin, the Scalloped
hammerhead. There are some genetics differences between the two, but
the only real physical difference is that the new fish has ten fewer
vertebrae—something impossible to detect simply by looking. The head—its
far more salient feature—remains regrettably the same.
5. Glow-in-the-Dark Cockroach
Peter Vrsansky & Dusan Chorvat
Sorry cockroaches, you don’t get to be any less disgusting just
because you master a nifty new trick like glowing in the dark. OK, maybe
you get to be a
little less disgusting, but only because your shape and your glow spots make you look like a cute, bug-eyed egg. Still, the
Luchihormetica luckae,
which was identified this year, manages to undo any good will it earns.
For starters, the creature it’s trying to mimic with its stay-away
nocturnal shimmer is the toxic click beetle, which achieves the
seemingly impossible task of being even lower than the roach on the
ladder of appeal. And those cute, glowing eye spots? They’re made by
pits in the animal’s skin filled with fluorescent bacteria.
4. NASA’S New Microbe
JPL-Caltech / NASA
NASA keeps looking for new species of microbes on Mars, but what it
didn’t expect was to find one in a clean room at the Kennedy Space
Center. As their name suggests, clean rooms are, you know, clean, which
not only keeps dust out of spacecraft, but prevents terrestrial
organisms from hitching a ride on them and contaminating other worlds.
Scientists regularly sample the air and surfaces in the rooms to check
for spotlessness, and at Kennedy, they found a bacterium they’d never
seen before, the berry-shaped Teriscoccus phoenicis. As it turns out,
the only other place in the world the microbe has been identified is in a
European Space Agency clean room in French Guiana. And no, no, no, that
does
not mean the bugs are extraterrestrial. What it means is
that they require exceedingly little to eat and, unlike most other
microbes, can thus get by in so nutrient-poor an environment. A related
species has also been found in only two places: yet another clean room
in Florida and a bore hole in a Colorado molybdenum mine, 1.3 mi. (2.1
km) underground.
3. New Turkish Scorpion
Ersen Aydın Yağmur
You’ve surely heard the fable of the scorpion that asks the turtle to
give it a lift across a river. The turtle demurs, saying that the
scorpion would just sting him
en route. The scorpion answers that
he’d never do such a thing since they’d both sink. The turtle, finding
that reasoning hard to argue with, agrees—whereupon, midway across the
river, the scorpion does administer a fatal sting. “Why did you do
that?” the turtle asks as it starts to sink. “It’s in my nature,” his
passenger says with a scorpion shrug. That’s all by way of saying that
the world has at least one more species of beast you shouldn’t trust,
now that researchers working in southwest Turkey have announced the
discovery of a new type of scorpion, known as the Euscorpius lycius.
It’s as creepy-looking as any scorpion, as poisonous as any scorpion and
as foul-tempered as any scorpion. But there’s not much to be afraid of.
Just an inch or so across, it administers a sting that would cause you
little more distress than a mosquito bite. Good news for us—bad news for
the much smaller critters that cross its fearsome path.
2. Panthera Blythae
Mauricio Anton / AP
Being extinct is no reason not to make news, which is something a
newly discovered species of great predatory cat, which last prowled the
Earth 4.4 million years ago, proved this year. The Panthera blythae,
discovered in Tibet, easily predates the previous big-cat record holder,
which lived in Tanzania 3.7 million years ago. The new beast had a
broad forehead that investigators compare to that of a modern snow
leopard, but at 50 lbs. (27 kg), it was comparatively small, about the
size of a modern clouded leopard. Still, like all big cats, it was
clearly built for the kill. One of its most noteworthy features was its
large teeth, which the investigators noticed were extremely heavily
worn. They didn’t get that way on salads.
1. T. Rex’s Great Uncle
Mark Loewen
Just what the other animals of the prehistoric world needed—ten
million extra years of living with the Tyrannosaurus rex family. That,
however, appears to be how things were, after paleontologists in
southern Utah announced the discovery of what they described as sort of a
“great uncle” of the T. rex, which lived 80 million years ago—pushing
the line way back from the 70 million year starting point previously
assumed. The new tyrant king was a bit smaller than its fabled grand
nephew, but that would have been little comfort to Cretaceous-era prey.
University of Maryland paleontologist Thomas Hotz, Jr. described the
beast as “banana-tooth[ed]”—and he was talking about size, not
sharpness. The animal’s name alone—Lythronax argestes—tells you the rest
of what you need to know. The Lythronax part means “king of gore.”
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