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The latest State of Observed Species report is out. And biologists might have just earned the title of Hardest-Working People in Science, discovering a staggering 19,232 species in just one year, including nearly 10,000 new types of insects. More »
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Sometimes it's easy to make a mistake when picking a photo of an animal — presenting an image of a rat instead of a mouse, for example. Or mistaking a crane fly for a mosquito. But whoever made this missing cat poster has taken the crown for animal mis-classification. More »
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You're looking at an artistic representation of what is known as a Hillis plot — a visual snapshot of the evolutionary relationships connecting Earth's various life forms. Evolutionary biologists would call this a big, circular phylogenetic tree. More »
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You're looking at three of the last known hirola on Earth. Since the 1970s, unregulated hunting, habitat destruction and drought linked to climate change have driven the number of these large African antelopes living in Kenya and Somalia from over 14,000 to fewer than 400. More »
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Some of the most commonly encountered spiders on Earth belong to the the family Linyphiidae. Yet much about the family's estimated 4,400 species remains a mystery, due in no small part to the fact that many of these species look almost identical, even under a microscope. More »
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You've gotta give it up for creative taxonomists — the scientists responsible for naming, and thereby classifying, newly discovered species. Without them, we'd never have species with names like the ant pictured above, who is named after a science fiction institution. (See if you can guess who it is — it's very subtle.) More »
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You're out in the wilderness — or maybe just your front yard — and you see a really weird animal. It's like a cross between a bat and a frog. Have you discovered a new species? If so, how would you prove it? More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5817241&view=rss&microfeed=true Over on MetaFilter, people have been a little concerned about the structure and purpose of our current monster smackdown, featuring cage matches between popular monsters. Commenter robocop is bleeding proposes an alternative to our (admittedly shallow) monster measurement contest. He writes: More »
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It's no secret that many scientists are great fans of science fiction, and sometimes tributes to characters and authors end up in their work. We list 30 species, alive and extinct, that bear scifi-themed names. More »
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In our quest to discover alien life forms, humans have looked deep into space, sent landers to Mars. and launched probes into the outer reaches of the solar system. But marine biologists discover new life forms here on Earth all the time, many of them truly bizarre and as alien to terrestrial life as anything you'll find in a scifi movie. That's why the Census of Marine Life is undertaking an amazing long-term project to catalog every single one of them and eventually make the information accessible to all of us. More »
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