If you have the money, a new website allows just about anyone to name a newly described species, and naming a species in honor of another person might make a great gift. Part of the proceeds from naming a species is donated to the World Wildlife Fund to protect endangered species. From PR Web, WA:

The new site, located at nameaspecies.com, already features several species available to be named. People pay for the right to name a species and half of the proceeds go directly to the researchers, so that the scientific process and those who push it forward benefit from these sales. Additionally, another portion of the proceeds will be contributed to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) as part of Name a Species’ mission to protect and celebrate the world’s biological diversity.

Possibly some fourteen species of snail, recently discovered and inventoried from the Australian Outback, may be new species. From Northern Territory, Australia:

The recent discovery of up to 14 new species of land snails in the Territory outback shows they may be slow, but they’re everywhere.

“Preliminary findings suggest the area is extremely rich in biodiversity, perhaps the hottest place in the Northern Territory,” said conservation scientist Dr Michael Braby.

There are a few newly described geckos being reported from Australia. From Mongabay.com:

Two species of gecko have been discovered in the southern deserts of Western Australia and South Australia, report researchers from the Western Australian Museum.

The Cape Range Gecko (Diplodactylus capensis) is found only on the Northwest Cape near Exmouth, while the Southern Sandplain Gecko (Lucasium bungabinna), occurs in the southern deserts in Western Australia and South Australia, north of the Nullarbor Plain.

A new species of legless lizard has been described from Brazil. From Bloomberg:

The newly identified lizard that lives in the largest savanna area of South America, a region that makes up a fifth of Brazil, survives on small bugs, termites and ants in the soil, said Lisa Bowen, a spokeswoman for the Arlington, Virginia-based group.The native grasslands once covered an area half the size of Europe but are being cleared at a faster rate than the Amazon rain forest for cropland to meet the rising demand for soybeans, sugar cane and cattle, said Ricardo Machado, author of a study by the conservation group on the Cerrado.

Part of a separate evolutionary line from snakes, the new sand-colored species, like other limbless lizards, has external ear openings and lacks the cranial modifications that enable snakes to ingest very large prey, Bowen said today in an e-mail.

Seven new species of glassfrog were discovered in Ecuador. From Mongabay.com:

Seven previously unknown species of frog discovered over the past two years by Ecuadorian researchers are already under threat from habitat loss, reports a newsletter from the IUCN Amphibian Specialist Group.

The frogs belong to the Glassfrog family, a group that is endemic to tropical America and has more than 140 species, of which 40 percent are threatened with extinction due to disease and habitat loss.

Start combing your backyards, because a new species of lichen was discovered on a wooden fence in San Simeon, California. From Point Reyes Light, CA:

Kerry Knudsen walked up to an old corral near the visitor center in Bear Valley on a Thursday morning in July. Holding his magnifying hand lens, a 10-power jeweler’s loupe, to his eye, he looked at the wooden fence, and within five minutes knew he was seeing a lichen previously unknown to science.

The new species will be called Lecanora simeonensis, and its story began nearly two years ago on the weathered conifer wood of another abandoned corral in San Simeon. “The minute I saw it, I knew we didn’t have anything described like that,” recalled Knudsen, lichen curator at the Herbarium of University of California, Riverside. “I knew it was something new when I first saw it, and then the process is to find more of it.”

The world’s longest insect, a new stick insect species, was named after a Malaysian naturalist. From the Independent, UK:

It lives high up in the rainforest canopy of Borneo, its eggs have tiny wings so they can glide from one tree to another, and now it has officially entered the record books as the longest insect species alive today.

A specimen of the stick insect Phobaeticus chani measures 56.6cm (22.3in) long with its legs fully stretched, which is more than a centimetre longer than the previous title holder, another stick insect called P. serratipes found in Malaysia.

Even without its long legs, P. chani has the longest body in the insect world, measuring 35.7cm, which is 2.9cm longer than the previous record holder, yet another stick insect from Borneo called P. kirbyi.

The specimen will go on display in the Creepy Crawlies gallery at the Natural History Museum in London. George Beccaloni, the museum’s curator of stick insects, said: “We’ve known about both the previous record holders for over 100 years, so it’s extraordinary an even bigger species has only just been discovered.

Image Found Here
Image Found Here

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