It’s that time of year when scientific organizations look back at some of the most amazing new animals, plants, fungi and other species they’ve discovered in the past 12 months.
“Finding and describing new species is key to understanding our planet’s biodiversity and protecting it from further loss,” Shannon Bennettchief scientist at the California Academy of Sciences, said ua news release on 138 new species discoveries her scientists are 2024. They range from a fish called a flounder that lives in sponges in Indonesian waters to an endangered dahlia from Oaxaca, Mexico.
Bennett said only about a dozen of the world’s species have been discovered so far, and many of them could be important to the ecosystems in which they are found. “We cannot protect or care for what we do not know exists.”
Scientists at the Natural History Museum in London reported to have discovered 190 new species in 2024but his list includes fossils other than living creatures such as the clear-winged moth and the vegetarian piranha named for its resemblance to the Eye of Sauron from The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Meanwhile, Kew Gardens in London and scientific publisher Pensoft each published a top 10 list of their favorite discoveries of the past year.
The investigative science news from 2024 also reveals some gems, including the world’s largest hummingbird and a new armadillo.
Here are some of the coolest finds.
Gecko ‘Starry Night’
This tiny lizard was found in the southwestern Ghats, a mountain range in India. Announcing the discovery in March, Ishan Agarwal, a researcher at the Thackeray Wildlife Foundation, said its back reminded researchers of a famous work by 19th-century Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh. “The striking color of the new species is reminiscent of one of his most famous paintings, Starry night.”
Description of a new species, officially named Cnemaspis vangoghiwas published in ZooKeys magazine. Its publisher, Pensoft, gave it the top spot on its list top 10 new species in 2024. He says they were chosen from new species described in the journals and were not based on any specific criteria, but were “completely arbitrary” and a “fun way” to look back at the year’s weird and wonderful discoveries.
Aphelandra ‘black souls’
Despite this plant’s spectacular pink flowers and spikes of 110 flowers each, Kew Gardens ranked it only 3rd in its top 10 list. It is found in the dry forests of northwestern Colombia and is related to the zebra plant, a popular cultivated plant from Brazil. Like its cousin, a new species, Aphelandra almanac, “has a lot of potential as a houseplant,” wrote Sebastian Kettley and Martin Cheek of Kew Gardens, who compiled the list. “Unfortunately, the clearing of its habitat means it is at risk of extinction.”
Eye of Sauron fish
The Natural History Museum’s inventory includes a number of interesting discoveries, including a vegetarian piranha called pacu from the Xingu River in Brazil. Museum scientists were there to document the freshwater animals, including some as yet undiscovered, that could be affected by the construction the controversial Belo Monte Dam. Rupert Collins, the museum’s senior curator of fish, said one of the reasons such dam projects get the green light is that the number of unique species that would be affected is underestimated. “Basically, we don’t fully know what lives in these places,” he said. The new rat got a name Myloplus sauron due to its similarity to the Eye of Sauron, from Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of JRR Tolkien The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Cadet clear-winged moth
A girl named Daisy Cadet discovered this unusual moth in her living room in Port Talbot, Wales and posted it on Instagram. One of her followers suggested she get in touch with a British charity called Butterfly Conservation, who put her in touch with the Natural History Museum. Research eventually revealed that it had hatched from a fragment of a seed pod stuck in the boot of Cadet’s mom, Ashleigh, a professional photographer, when she was flying home from an assignment in central Guyana. Mark Sterling, a researcher at the Natural History Museum, helped identify it as a clear-winged moth and name the new species Carmenta brachyclados, announcing the discovery in October.
A fish that lives in a sponge
Scientists from the California Academy of Sciences, based in San Francisco, discovered 35 new fish in 2024, including this cephalopod from Indonesian waters. While its close relatives are free-living fish that live on the shallow seabed below 10 meters deep, the new species, Bathygobius merolives in a large barrel sponge in deeper waters, between nine and 30 meters below the surface.
The world’s largest hummingbird
Although large animals are often easier to spot than small ones, it took until 2024 discover the northern giant hummingbird, the largest in the world. It turns out that another species of giant hummingbird led the scientists to the discovery. A well-known species Patagonia gigasnow called the southern giant hummingbird, it breeds along the Pacific coast of central Chile, but disappears after the breeding season. Researchers from the University of New Mexico, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and Centro de Ornitología y Biodiversidad in Peru decided to follow them by attaching a mini GPS backpack. They discovered that the birds fly high in the Andes, all the way to northern Peru. There they hang out among the even larger giant hummingbird, a new species that lives at high altitudes all year round. Although both species look similar, northern giant hummingbirds they have a longer beak (close to 40 mm or almost five mm longer) and longer wings (each wing is about 30 mm long compared to about 22 mm for the southern species). A new species, the northern giant hummingbird, has been given a scientific name Patagonia chaski after the chaski is the messenger of the Inca empire.
A new Andean glass frog
A green translucent frog with lavender eyes was among two new species of glass frog found in the southern Andes of Ecuador. Glass frogs are a group of amphibians whose hearts can be seen beating through their transparent bellies. Buckley’s glass frog, found in a large part of the tropical Andes, was considered the most widespread. But new research published in August it showed that what was thought to be one species was actually several, with different physical features, shapes and genetics. One of the new species, pictured above, is named Marco Reyes’ Glass Frog, Centrolene marcoreyesiafter the late famous herpetologist from the National Biodiversity Institute of Ecuador.
Guyanese long-nosed armadillo
New species in 2024 include a range of mammals, including rats, mice and the first new species of armadillo in 30 years. Like Buckley’s glass frogs, nine-banded armadillos were thought to have an enormous range. But genetic testing shows that there are actually four species, including one that is slightly larger than the other three and lives in a part of northeastern South America called the Guiana Shield — the Guiana long-nosed armadillo, Dasypus guianensis.
A new parasitoid wasp from Texas
While many of these new species have been found in fairly exotic locations, there are new creatures waiting to be discovered even in the cities of North America. A new type of wasp, Chrysonotomyia susbelliwas found on the campus of Rice University in Houston. “You don’t have to travel to a remote rainforest to find new and beautiful things — you just have to get out there and look,” said Scott Egan, associate professor of life sciences. The wasp was found inside the bile, a tumor-like growth, created by the so-called gall wasp Neuroterus bussaeon the leaves of southern live oaks. It belongs to a group of parasitoid wasps, which prey on the larvae of other insects, but is the first of its kind known to target this species of gall wasp.
