This article highlights five newly discovered species that scientists find fascinating, emphasizing the urgency of documenting biodiversity in the face of climate change and habitat loss. It focuses on the discovery of a new species of clouded tiger-cat in the Andes mountains.
Officially, Earth boasts roughly two million species. Unofficially, scientists suspect there could be millions — perhaps over 100 million — more. Each year, scientists add thousands of new species to the scientific record in an attempt to get a better count. Some discoveries stem from intrepid adventures deep into the jungle, while others come from reanalyzing old specimens stored in dusty museum collections.
Each new plant, fish, beetle or bird is a unique and irreplaceable answer to the question of how to make a living on Earth, and scientists are racing to describe them. Climate change and the ongoing biodiversity crisis add extra urgency to these efforts, since many of these new species risk going extinct just as soon as they're discovered. Here are five species that struck NPR as especially wonderful, both because of the biology of the species, as well as the stories behind their discovery. 'Knowing them so deeply as I do, I knew this was not just some sort of variation,' he said.'I knew it would go deeper, way deeper.' De Oliveira, a tiger-cat expert at Maranhão State University in Brazil, has spent many hours looking at the two described tiger-cats that prowl South America. But the photos in that email, from camera traps in the Andes mountains, struck him as different. The house-cat-sized creature in these photos had more irregular spots, seemingly thicker fur, and just moved differently than the known species, he told NPR.) as a new species. The investigation revealed the clouded tiger-cat as genetically and geographically distinct from the other two species, the northern tiger-cat and southern tiger-cat. While those species stick to the lowlands of savannahs and coastal forests, the clouded-tiger cat is only found in the mountains of Central and South America. 'Females have only one pair of nipples, not two, as in the other tiger-cats,' de Oliveira says.'That's totally different
BIODIVERSITY CLIMATE CHANGE NEW SPECIES DISCOVERIES TIGER-CAT ANDES MOUNTAINS
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