The International Institute for Species Exploration at Arizona State University that has just come out with the top 10 new species of 2012! This is the 5th year they have come out with such a list. If you would like to nominate your favorite new species discovered in 2013, click here.
Here are my favorites from the 2012 list:
The snub nose monkey (Rhinopithecus strykeri) from Myanmar that sneezes when it rains:
In 2018, a new species of centipede graced the pages of the prominent taxonomy journal
Zootaxa. More than 14 centimeters long, with striking teal-colored legs, it lives in the montane and mossy forests of the Philippines. Now, however, the centipede is in a harsh spotlight. The Philippine government says the Spanish neurologist and amateur biologist who described the species acquired his specimens illegally.
Neither the journal’s editors nor its peer reviewers caught the lapse and the journal has no policy requiring documentation that specimens have been collected with proper permits. Some editors tell
Science that should change. Others worry about hampering research when undescribed species are vanishing fast. And all agree that journals would struggle to enforce any such rules, given the wide variation in countries’ legal requirements. “There is simply no way for a journal to police this,” says Maarten Christenhusz, an independent botanist and editor-in-chief of the