Anyone Ever Found A New Species?

[crabfossilsteve]

It is certainly interesting to see how many fellow "fossil nuts" on this forum have found beasties new to science.

A few years ago a buddy and myself found 3 new species of Cretaceous crabs, one of which also represented a new genus. The new genus was in the family Orithopsidae and was named Paradoxicarcinus nimonoides, so although small, it is wild (Paradoxi comes from the Latin paradoxus, meaning "strange, contrary to expectation, marvelous" and carcinus for crab). The species name has a story to go with it since my friend said it reminded him of a creature called the Nimon from the BBC television series "Dr. Who"...ha ha. Feldman was kind enough to incorporate the name and story into the publication.

All told the site location has also produced a very cool array of beasties from the ecosystem.

We were lucky in that the big crab systematist Rodney Feldman was already working on a paper with some other crabs and lobsters from Vancouver Island, B.C. Our crabs got incorporated into the paper so the period from discovery to publication was fairly short. It was fun to find something new to science and see it published.

Not sure if it is new yet, but last year found an Eocene/Miocene ratfish eggcase. Look them up. It took a bunch of searching to figure out what the heck it was just for starters. Hoping we can find someone to describe the beastie.

Crabfossilsteve

[fishman]

As someone who is interested and knows a fair amount about plants, both modern and prehistoric, I wonder how many hundreds of thousands of plant species are out there in fossils that we just don't know about. Many, many living plants can only be differentiated by their flowers, along with maybe their size or an almost unnoticeable difference in foliage. Realistically, there's almost no way of comparing small differences in size as the environment plays a large role in that as well. Also, the flowers are almost never preserved and, when they are, the color is gone and they are squished. Makes you think...