New species discoveries: wild cat, penguin and snake found

Penguins and tiger cats and octopi, oh my! A myriad of new species being discovered just as doomsdayism starts to colonise the popular imagination seems, almost, like a message to abandon the lens of anthropocentricism to see all that the world holds beyond homo sapiens sapiens. The cheer that greeted the discovery of a new species of wild cat, the Leopardus tilcayo, in Bolivia’s “cloud forests” may have been the loudest — it’s the first discovery of a new feline species in a 100 years — but celebrate, too, the identification of a new penguin species (also the first in a century) on a group of remote subantarctic islands. And the snake species, named after Guns ‘N’ Roses guitarist Slash, that has its home in New Guinea. And the golf ball-sized blue octopus that swims in the waters around the Galapagos Islands.

As a study published by a University of Arizona research team last year shows, the quest to identify and name every species found on Earth, which began three centuries ago with Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus, has picked up pace in recent years. Fifteen per cent of all known species have been discovered in the last 20 years alone. The discoveries offer some glimmer of hope at a time when it seems like conservation is barely keeping pace with the unchecked destruction of habitats under pressure from, among other factors, climate instability and pollution.

The human predilection for the photogenic has meant that the vast majority of these discoveries — dominated by arthropods like insects, arachnids and myriapods like millipedes and centipedes — receive little attention beyond the scientific and conservation communities. But the wonder that is the biosphere deserves more.