Illacme plenipes, the record-breaking millipede, only lives in a few woodlands in Northern California. Image via Marek et. al.

Yesterday, the first full description of the species was published in the joural ZooKeys. The study was led by Paul Marek of the University of Arizona. The millipede is known only from 17 live specimens Marek’s team found in a home range that is remarkably specific: three small wooded areas strewn with Arkose sandstone boulders in the foothills of San Benito County, California, near San Francisco.

The rareness of the millipede meant that from 1928 until 2005—when Marek, then a Ph.D. student, found a few specimens in the woods near San Juan Bautista—most scientists had simply assumed the species had gone extinct. Over the past seven years, Marek and his colleagues have taken several trips to the area, typically searching for hours before finding a single specimen clinging to the side of a boulder or tunneling four to six inches down into the ground.

In studying these specimens under a microscope, Marek has discovered a number of surprising characteristics that go beyond its legs. ”It basically looks like a thread,” Marek told LiveScience. “It has an uninteresting outward appearance, but when we looked at it with SEM [scanning electron microscopes] and compound microscopes, we found a huge, amazingly complex anatomy.”

The new analysis revealed that the millipede has no eyes, disproportionately long antennae and a rudimentary fused mouth adapted for sucking and piercing plant structures. It also has specialized body hairs on its back that produce silk, which may be used as a defense mechanism to clear bacteria off the millipedes’ bodies.

A microscope image of the species’ specialized body hairs that produce a silk secretion. Image via Marek et. al.

Of course, the legs are the most striking part of the species’ anatomy. Despite the name millipede, no species are known to have 1,000 legs, but Illacme plenipes comes closest (its Latin name actually means “in highest fulfillment of feet”). The male specimens examined had at most 562 legs, but the females had more, with the winner at 750.

Most millipedes have somewhere between 80 and 100 legs. Marek and his colleagues speculate that this species’ extreme legginess could be a beneficial adaptation for subterranean tunneling or even for clinging to the boulders widely found in the species’ habitat.

Most millipedes have 80 to 100 legs, but this species has up to 750. Image via Marek et. al.

DNA analysis has revealed that its closest cousin, Nematozonium filum, lives in Africa, with the two species’ ancestors apparently splitting apart sometime soon after the breakup of Pangea, more than 200 million years ago.

The team has tried to grow the millipedes in a lab but has so far been unable to. They caution that the species could be extremely endangered—in 2007, they stopped searching for wild specimens out of fears that they were depleting the population—and advocate for a formal protection listing, so scientists will have the time to learn more about them before the millipedes go extinct.

Scientists discovered a pair of spade-toothed carcasses in New Zealand. Previously, the species was only known from specimens such as this skull found in the 1950s, currently held at the University of Auckland. Image via Current Biology

In December 2010, visitors to Opape Beach, on New Zealand’s North Island, came across a pair of whales—a mother and her calf—that had washed ashore and died. The Department of Conservation was called in; they took photos, collected tissue samples and then buried the corpses at a site nearby. At first, it was assumed that the whales had been relatively common Gray’s beaked whales, widely distributed in the Southern Hemisphere. (You can see the graphic images here, should you wish.)

Months later, when researchers analyzed the tissue DNA, they were shocked. These were spade-toothed whales, members of the world’s rarest whale species, previously known only from a handful of damaged skulls and jawbones that had washed ashore over the years. Until this find, no one had ever seen a complete spade-toothed whale body. The researchers scrambled to exhume the corpses and brought them to the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa for further analysis.

“This is the first time this species—a whale over five meters in length—has ever been seen as a complete specimen, and we were lucky enough to find two of them,” said biologist Rochelle Constantine of the University of Auckland, one of the authors of a paper revealing the discovery that was published today in Current Biology. “Up until now, all we have known about the spade-toothed beaked whale was from three partial skulls collected from New Zealand and Chile over a 140-year period. It is remarkable that we know almost nothing about such a large mammal.”

The species belongs to the beaked whale family, which is relatively mysterious as a whole, mostly because these whales can dive to extreme depths and for very long periods—as deep as 1,899 meters and for as long as 30 minutes or more. Additionally, the majority of beaked whale populations are thinly distributed in very small numbers, so of the 21 species in the family, there are thorough descriptions of only three.

Of these species, the spade-toothed whale may have been the most mysterious. Scientifically known as Mesoplodon traversii, it was named after Henry H. Travers, a New Zealand naturalist who collected a partial jawbone that was found on Pitt Island in 1872. Since then, a damaged skull found on White Island in the 1950s and another found on Robinson Crusoe Island off the Coast of Chile in 1986 are the only evidence of the species.

Because the whales were never seen alive, scientists knew nothing of their behavior. In the paper, they are described as “the least known species of whale and one of the world’s rarest living mammals.”

“When these specimens came to our lab, we extracted the DNA as we usually do for samples like these, and we were very surprised to find that they were spade-toothed beaked whales,” Constantine said. To determine that, the researchers compared mitochondrial DNA from both of the stranded whales’ tissue samples and found that they matched that from the skulls and jawbones collected decades ago. “We ran the samples a few times to make sure before we told everyone,” Constantine said.

The researchers note that New Zealand’s national policy of collecting and sequencing DNA from all cetaceans washed ashore has proven especially valuable in cases like these—if this policy weren’t in place, no one might ever have known that the body of a spade-toothed whale had been seen for the first time.

This delayed discovery of a species that has been swimming the oceans all along hints at how much we still don’t know about the natural world—especially the oceans—even in this well-informed age. “It may be that they are simply an offshore species that lives and dies in the deep ocean waters and only rarely wash ashore,” Constantine said, explaining how it could take so long to find the species for the first time. “New Zealand is surrounded by massive oceans. There is a lot of marine life that remains unknown to us.”

The crested ibis is one of the world’s most endangered bird species, but captive breeding programs might help it make a comeback. Image via Flickr user Andy_Li

In our October issue, Michelle Nijhuis joins wildlife biologists in searching Colorado’s caves and waterfalls for one of the world’s most mysterious bird species: the black swift. Although fewer than 100 breeding sites of the black swift are known, Nijhuis was lucky enough to see ornithologist Ron Torretta locate a black swift that had been geotagged in 2010, providing researchers with a cache of information about the wanderings of the enigmatic bird. Here are a few more of the most mysterious and elusive of the world’s bird species.

1. Night Parrot: Between 1912 and 1979, birders spotted this elusive species, native to the interior of Australia, exactly zero times—leading most scientists to believe it had gone extinct. Since then, a tiny handful of sightings of the nocturnal, yellow-green bird have occurred, and experts now estimate that the population is somewhere between 50 and 250 mature individuals. After the last verified sighting in November 2006, when park rangers in the state of Queensland turned up a decapitated specimen that had died after flying into a barbed-wire fence, the Australian government chose to keep the find temporarily secret while they searched for more night parrots, so as to avoid an influx of birders flooding the remote park in hopes of spotting one of the world’s rarest birds.

The Ribbon-tailed Astrapia has tail plumage three times its body length, the longest for any bird. Image via Wikimedia Commons/Marka Harper

2. Ribbon-tailed Astrapia: Endemic to the forest highlands of Papua New Guinea, this bird has the longest tail feathers (in relation to body size) of any bird species, with feathers three times its body length. Unfortunately, this stunning plumage has enticed poachers; hunting, along with habitat loss, has led to the species being listed as “near threatened” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. The species, the most recent bird of paradise to be documented, was first described by explorer Fred Shaw Mayer in 1938.

3. Palila: This species of Hawaiian honeycreeper has one particularly mysterious characteristic—it subsists almost exclusively on the seeds of the māmane plant, which contain a level of toxins that would kill any other small animal. Scientists aren’t sure how the birds digest the seemingly-lethal seeds, although the palila have been observed avoiding certain plants, indicating they might have a way of selecting seeds with lower levels of poison. In 1978, the federal government ruled that feral goats and sheep had to be removed from the palila’s only remaining habitat—the upper slopes of Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawai’i—since they consumed māmane plants and threatened the birds’ survival.

The flightless kakapo nearly went extinct when invasive predators were intentionally introduced to New Zealand. Image via Wikimedia Commons/Brent Barrett

4. The Kakapo: Some 82 million years ago, the island of New Zealand broke off from what would become Australia, and the strange, flightless nocturnal parrot species called the kakapo began its unusual evolutionary path. In the absence of predators, it became the world’s largest type of parrot and lost the ability to fly; when European colonists introduced cats, rats and ferrets to New Zealand to control the population of rabbits, the kakapo was nearly wiped out. Now, just 126 wild kakapos live on three predator-free islands off the coast of New Zealand.

5. The Crested Ibis: Named for the crest of white plumage that extends from its nape, the crested ibis used to nest across Japan, China, Korea, Taiwan and Russia. By 1981, after years of habitat loss, just five individuals remained in the wild in Japan, and though scientists took the birds into captivity, a breeding program was unsuccessful. Now, the last remaining wild population—some 500 birds in the Chinese province of Shaanxi—is being buttressed by chicks hatched in captivity as part of a Chinese program. Although the species is still listed as endangered, scientists are cautiously optimistic that it is finally making a comeback.

An Aguilla Bank skink, one of the 24 new species discovered. Photo by Karl Questel

We live in an age of alarming extinction, in which many species are lost in large part due to human activity. At the same time, the natural world is so complex that even after centuries of research, scientists are still rapidly discovering new species everywhere from mountain tops to rain forests to the ocean floor.

This paradox is aptly illustrated by an announcement made yesterday: 24 new species of lizards, known as skinks, have been discovered in the Caribbean islands. But half of them may be close to extinction, and some may already extinct in the wild.

The research was conducted by a team led by Blair Hedges, a biologist at Penn State University and one of the world’s foremost experts at identifying new forms of life. Previously, Hedges has been involved with the discovery of what were then the world’s smallest snake, lizard and frog. The two dozen species named in this paper, published in the journal Zootaxa, constitute one of the largest mass discoveries of lizards in centuries.

To identify the many species of skinks (formally, members of the family Scincidae), Hedges and his team examined specimens housed at zoos and conservation centers around the world. By comparing taxonomic features of the lizards (such as the shapes of scales) and using DNA analysis, they determined that there are a total of 39 distinct species of skinks that live in the Caribbean—6 species that were previously recognized, 9 that had been named long ago but had been considered invalid and the 24 entirely new ones.

A Caicos Islands skink. Photo by Joseph Burgess

“Now, one of the smallest groups of lizards in this region of the world has become one of the largest groups,” Hedges said in a press release. “We were completely surprised to find what amounts to a new fauna, with co-occurring species and different ecological types.” He has determined that the skinks came to the Americas roughly 18 million years ago, likely arriving from Africa on floating rafts of vegetation.

How did the skinks go unnoticed for so long? Hedges speculates that because large numbers of skinks had already disappeared by the start of the 20th century, scientists, tourists and local residents have been much less likely to encounter them in the years since. Additionally, many of the characteristics that distinguish the species from one another have been overlooked or weren’t detectable until now, especially those indicated by DNA analysis.

The researchers determined that the skinks have long been most threatened by an exotic intruder: the mongoose, introduced from India to Cuba in 1872 with the intention of reducing rat populations in sugarcane fields. Rat populations were partially controlled, but by 1900, nearly half of the islands to which the mongoose had spread were also without skinks, and the remaining lizards have dwindled in population ever since. Additionally, the researchers note, current human activities such as forest removal are likely contributing to the skinks’ endangered status. The research team hopes that their data will be used to plan future conservation efforts.

Theoretically, if you’re in the U.S. Virgin Islands, Trinidad and Tobago, or Martinique, you might try looking for a skink. But because each of the species is remarkably rare—with even the non-endangered ones qualifying as vulnerable—it’ll certainly be difficult. Above all, if you do want to find one, hurry up: there may not be much time left.

A Sunda clouded leopard caught in a camera trap on Borneo (photo courtesy of Wilting & Mohamed, Sabah Wildlife Department, Sabah Forestry Department)

Clouded leopards—named for their large, cloud-like spots—are rare. They are medium-sized (a bit bigger than a housecat) tree dwellers with big teeth and big paws that let them hang upside down among the foliage. In 2006, scientists used DNA studies to determine that there were two species of clouded leopards: Neofelis nebulosa, which lives on the Asian mainland and is the subject of a breeding program at the National Zoo (producing some of the world’s most adorable kittens), and Neofelis diardi, the Sunda clouded leopard, found on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra.

Now a group of researchers led by the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Germany has determined the the Borneo and Sumatra populations are really two separate subspecies, splitting this rare kitty into two even rarer varieties. The scientists, reporting in Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, analyzed DNA from 15 leopards on Borneo and 16 on Sumatra and also examined the skulls and coats of museum specimens. They found that the kitties on the two islands looked very similar on the outside but had significant differences in skull shape and in their genetics.

The scientists aren’t certain about the events that led to the evolution of the various species and sub-species, but here’s what they propose: The ancestor species to all modern clouded leopards was living in Southeast Asia when the super-volcano Toba erupted on Sumatra around 75,000 years ago, possibly plunging the Earth into a years-long volcanic winter. Two populations of clouded leopards survived—one in southern China, which evolved into the modern-day clouded leopard, N. nebulosa, and one on Borneo, which became the Sunda clouded leopard, N. diardi. When sea level was low, some of those Sunda clouded leopards were able to travel back to Sumatra, but when the last Ice Age ended, around 10,000 years ago, and sea levels rose, Borneo and Sumatra were once again isolated from each other and the two populations were left to evolve into sub-species apart from each other.

The copepod Ceratonotus steiningeri was discovered by COML scientists in the Angola Basin in 2006 (Credit: Jan Michels)

Ten years ago a group of marine scientists founded the Census of Marine Life and set out to answer three questions: What did live in the oceans? What does live in the oceans? What will live in the oceans? More than 2,700 scientists would participate in the Census on more than 540 expeditions around the world. They found nearly 250,000 marine species, upping the count by about 20,000; they estimate there are at least a million marine species in the oceans and tens to hundreds of millions of kinds of microbes.

There were schools of fish the size of Manhattan and animals that commuted like clockwork up and down the water column. There were living things in every bit of ocean the scientists looked at, from the deep dark depths to frozen seawater to waters so hot they would melt lead. There were mats of bacteria that extended for hundreds of kilometers.

But there was bad news, too. Scientists documented what used to live in the seas by checking historical records of sightings and catches, and also restaurant menus. Many species had declined in numbers, sometimes within one human generation. Phytoplankton, which sits at the base of the food web, has also declined in the last century.

This first Census is officially done, but it wasn’t complete. The Census has no records for about 20 percent of the ocean’s volume, and records are sparse for some large areas.

But the Census has already had a huge effect, not only in introducing us to thousands more of the species with which we share the planet (some were featured recently in our story Weird Creatures of the Deep), but also by setting a baseline against which we can measure our impact on the oceans. We fish some species too much, pollute the waters and change ocean chemistry through climate change. At least now we can get a good idea of how bad the situation is becoming.

A three-week-old Florida panther kitten (image copyright Science/AAAS)

Call them panthers, mountain lions, cougars or pumas, the Americas’ largest cat species has been dwindling in eastern North America for hundreds of years. They were extirpated from everywhere but some shrinking habitat in Florida between Naples and Miami. And even there, the panthers were not doing well. By the mid-1990s, the population consisted of just a couple dozen adult cats, and they were suffering from the problems of inbreeding: low reproduction rates, sperm quality and testosterone levels; heart defects; kinked tails; and high loads of parasites and pathogens. It wasn’t looking good for the Florida kitties.

A male Florida panther looks down from a tree (Image courtesy of Larry W. Richardson)

In 1995, conservationists tried to bolster the Florida population by introducing eight female panthers from Texas. The two subspecies used to intermingle, so transferring a few females would restore some of the natural gene flow. Fifteen years later, scientists are declaring the program a success. The addition of just a few new kitties to the gene pool resulted in a more diverse population that no longer suffered from the problems of inbreeding. And the population tripled in size. (The study appears in today’s issue of Science.)

Florida’s panthers, like so many cat species, still face serious challenges to their survival, including habitat loss and disease. But it’s heartening to see that relatively simple solutions—transferring a handful of cats combined with efforts to preserve habitat and reduce deaths from car accidents—can have such a positive effect on a population.

Earlier this week, the BBC announced the discovery of tigers in Bhutan living high above the treeline, far from where anyone had expected the cats could survive. Scientists hope to create a corridor connecting small, scattered tiger populations, such as this one in Bhutan, with others across much of Asia. The idea being that, like the Florida panthers, Asia’s tiger populations would get stronger from increased genetic diversity.

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Just how long has the world’s oldest living thing been on this planet? That would be Siberian actinobacteria, and they’ve been here for some 400,000 to 600,000 years, longer than our species has existed.

Photographer Rachel Sussman is keeping track of these ancient specimens. She’s been photographing organisms that are 2,000 years old and older around the world (nicely mapped out here). There’s the world’s oldest predator (also the biggest), the 2,400-year-old Armillaria fungus in Oregon, which kills trees. And a 2,000-year-old brain coral off the coast of Tobago. And a clonal creosote bush that’s been living in the Mojave Desert for 12,000 years.

Sussman is blogging about her adventures. She’s currently in Sicily, trying to figure out the age of an ancient chestnut tree. She estimates she’s got maybe two more years to go on the project. Why spend so much time photographing old things? She explains in her recent TEDTalk (above):

The oldest living things in the world are a record and celebration of our past, a call to action in the present and a barometer of our future. They’ve survived for millennia in desert, in the permafrost, at the tops of mountains and at the bottom of the ocean. They’ve withstood untold natural perils and human encroachments, but now some of them are in jeopardy, and they can’t just get up and get out of the way. It’s my hope that, by going to find these organisms, that I can help draw attention to their remarkable resilience and help play a part in insuring their continued longevity into the foreseeable future.

I look forward to seeing what she makes of the project.

A koala at Sydney Wildlife World (photo by Sarah Zielinski)

Many of the poster animals of Australia—kangaroos, koalas, wombats and wallabies, to name a few—are marsupials, animals best known for carrying around their young in a pouch. Marsupials can also be found in the Americas; in the United States, the Virginia opossum is the only one, but there are dozens of species in Central and South America.

Scientists trying to draw the marsupial family tree have been perplexed by contradictory evidence: DNA studies suggested that the Australian branch was an offshoot of South American animals that migrated to Australia when the two continents were connected and part of Gondwana. Fossil studies, though, seemed to show that some of the Australian marsupials had made their way back to South America.

In a new study in PLoS Biology, researchers from Germany set out to make a marsupial family tree using retroposons, a kind of jumping gene—pieces of DNA that are copied and pasted at random within the genome. The more closely related two species are, the more retroposons they will share.

Comparing the retroposons of the 21 marsupials showed that they all shared 10 jumping genes, thus confirming that they shared one ancestor. But the South American and Australian marsupials formed distinct groups; the Australians shared retroposons that their South American relatives lacked. The researchers were also able to determine that the South American branch was older (meaning that the Australian marsupials had come from South America) because the South Americans lacked two retroposons shared by everyone in the Australian branch.

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Dodo (Raphus cucullatus)

A 17th-century Dutch drawing of a dodo (via Wikimedia commons)

The dodo has become synonymous with extinction. To “go the way of the dodo,” for example, means that something is headed out of existence. The three-foot-tall, flightless bird lived on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. They probably ate fruit. Though the birds did not fear humans, hunting was not a huge problem for the birds as they didn’t taste very good. More troublesome were the other animals that came with people—like dogs, cats and rats—that destroyed dodo nests. Human destruction of their forest homes was also a contributor to the dodo’s decline. The last dodo was seen on the island sometime in the late 1600s.

Steller’s sea cow (Hydrodamalis gigas)

Georg Steller's drawing of the sea cow that bears his name (via Wikimedia commons)

Georg Steller first described his sea cow in 1741 on an expedition to the uninhabited Commander Islands off the coast of Kamchatka. The placid sea creature probably grew as big as 26 feet long and weighed around 8 to 10 tons. It fed on kelp. Just 27 years after Steller’s discovery, however, it was hunted to extinction.

Great auk (Pinguinus impennis)

Audubon's painting of great auks (via Wikimedia commons)

Millions of these black-and-white birds once inhabited rocky islands in some of the coldest parts of the North Atlantic, where the sea provided a bounty of fish. Though their population numbers probably took a hit during the last Ice Age, it was the feathers that kept them warm that led to their downfall. The soft down feathers were preferred pillow filling in Europe in the 1500s and in North America in the 1700s. The dwindling birds were further doomed when their eggs became a popular collector’s item. The last live auk was seen in Newfoundland in 1852.

Passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius)

Martha, the last surviving member of the passenger pigeon species (Photo courtesy Natural History Museum)

The passenger pigeon was once the most numerous bird species in North America, making up 25 to 40 percent of all birds on the continent. There were as many as 3 to 5 billion of them before the Europeans arrived. They would migrate in huge flocks consisting of millions of birds. In the 1800s, however, they became a popular food item. Tens of thousands could be killed in a day. By the end of that century, when laws were finally passed to ban their hunting, it was too late. The last wild bird was captured in 1900. Martha, the last of her kind, died in 1914 at the Cincinnati Zoological Garden.

Carolina parakeet (Conuropsis carolinensis)

Audubon's painting of Carolina parakeets (via Wikimedia commons)

The eastern United States once had its own native parrot, the Carolina parakeet. But farmers cut down their forests and made fields, and then killed the birds for being pests. Some birds were taken so that their feathers could adorn ladies’ hats, and others became pets. The last wild parakeet was killed in 1904 in Florida. The last captive bird, which oddly enough lived in the same cage in which the passenger pigeon Martha died (above), died in 1918.

Tasmanian tiger, a.k.a. the thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus)

Captive Tasmanian tigers in Washington D.C., c. 1906 (via Wikimedia commons)

The thylacine wasn’t really a tiger, though it got that name for the stripes on its back. The largest carnivorous marsupial, it was once native to New Guinea, Tasmania and Australia. It had already become rare by the time Europeans found Australia, confined to the island of Tasmania. In the 1800s, a bounty was put on the species because it was a danger to the sheep flocks on the island. The last wild thylacine was killed in 1930, though some may have survived into the 1960s.

Golden toad (Bufo periglenes)

A male golden toad (via Wikimedia commons)

They lived in the Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve in Costa Rica. Most of the year, they were hard to find, and scientists think they may have lived underground. But during the rainy season of April to June, they would gather in small, temporary pools to mate. The population crashed in 1987 due to a bad patch of weather and none have been seen since 1991. No one is sure what happened, but climate change, deforestation and invasive species have all been suggested as possible culprits.

You can discover one and name it yourself.

A colleague, friend or family member might have enough new species lying around and be willing to name one after you.

If you have enough money, you could pay an institution or charity to give a species your name. The Scripps Institution of Oceanography last year offered naming rights for several ocean species, starting from the rock-bottom price of $5,000.

Of course, if you’re famous, a scientist may honor you with, say, a spider, a la Myrmekiaphila neilyoungi, or the tapeworm Acanthobothrium zimmeri, recently named for science writer Carl Zimmer.

But naming a creature after a person seems to lack a certain amount of creativity. After all, the rules for naming species are surprisingly open: The name must not be offensive, must be spelled in only the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet and may be derived from any language. In fact, a name need not be derived from anything at all; the rules state that an arbitrary combination of letters is also perfectly acceptable. (In contrast, astronomical bodies—like stars, asteroids and planets—have strict naming conventions overseen by committees.) So why shouldn’t a biologist have some fun when naming something she discovered?

Fictional characters (Han solo) have been honored, as have imaginary places (Dracorex hogwartsia). Unsurprisingly—since we are dealing with scientists—the genre of science fiction and fantasy seems to be a big draw, with the works of J.R.R. Tolkien a popular source (Gollumjapyx smeagol, Oxyprimus galadrielae, Macrostyphlus frodo and M. gandalf).

Some scientists turn to mythology, including Greek (Cassiopeia andromeda) and Norse (Clossiana thore).

Religion is another great source for names. There are species named for Indian gods (Stegodon ganesa), Egyptian gods (Papio anubis) and even a host of Aztec gods (Alabagrus coatlicue, A. ixtilton, A. mixcoatl and A. xolotl). The Christian devil has whole genuses named after him (Lucifer, Mephisto and Satan). And there’s even Noah’s Ark (Arca noae).

For those who like wordplay, there are anagrams (Rabilimis mirabilis), palindromes (Orizabus subaziro), rhymes (Cedusa medusa) and puns galore (Agra phobia, Gelae baen, Ytu brutus and Pieza pi).

The “creature from the black lagoon,” Eucritta melanolimnetes (via Wikimedia Commons)

Some names are clever only in translation, such as Eucritta melanolimnetes, which can be roughly translated as “the creature from the black lagoon.” Others only make sense if you know they derive from a misspelling. The genus Alligator, for example, derives from “el lagarto,” Spanish for “the lizard.”

Geography is an obvious source (Panama canalia), but there are a number of species whose names don’t seem to match their range. There’s the Australian death adder named Acanthophis antarcticus and the Tahitian blue lorikeet, Vini peruviana.

But sometimes people just run out of ideas. When one scientist reached his ninth species of leafhopper, he named it Erythroneura ix. And one early 20th-century biologist found so many species of olethreutid moths that it seems to have strained his creativity. A sampling includes: Eucosma bobana, E. cocana, E. dodana, E. fofana, E. hohana, E. kokana, E. lolana and E. momana. You get the idea.

Maybe he ran out of people he liked enough to give them a moth. I wouldn’t mind, though, having one named after me. And unlike Carl Zimmer and Neil Young, my last name lends itself perfectly to scientific nomenclature.

This microscopic shell comes from a snail, Opisthostoma vermiculum, found in a limestone hill habitat in Malaysia. Its morphology is unique, twisting around four different coiling axes, the most for any gastropod. “In addition, the whorls detach three times and reattach twice to preceding whorls in a fairly consistent manner, which suggests that the coiling strategy is under some form of strict developmental-gene control.”

This snail made the list of the top ten new species described in 2008, as decided by the International Institute for Species Exploration at Arizona State University and an international group of taxonomists. Others, which can all be found online here, include caffeine-free coffee, the ghost slug, a bacterium found in hairspray and the world’s longest insect.

Credit: Courtesy of Reuben Clements/World Wildlife Fund for Nature-Malaysia