From an adorable Madagascan lemur to a deadly, venomous spider in Florida, here are ten of
the most bizarre recently discovered species, including some that are prehistoric!
10: Madagascar’s Mouse Lemur A new species of mouse lemur has been discovered
in Madagascar as the tiniest primate in the entire world.
That’s right, it’s not quite a tiny monkey, but to a lot of people, it is even cuter!
Yu’re going to wish you had one of these as a pet.
It’s under a foot long (30cm) and has giant, adorable eyes.
It kind of looks like an alien, to be honest!
But how did they find it?
It all happened when scientists were on the hunt for lemurs in the forests of Madagascar.
Out of nowhere, they spotted a pair of bright eyes glaring at them from out of the dark.
The first thing they noticed was that the eyes were quite large considering the animal
was only about the size of a fist.
Upon closer inspection, they realized that this was an entirely new mouse lemur that
had never been seen before.
This is outstanding considering there are already 108 known species of lemur, and even
more amazing since a third of them are currently critically endangered.
Unfortunately for this newest lemur, it could already be on the edge of extinction.
That is, according to Ute Radespiel from the University of Veterinary Medicine Hannover.
Ute has been studying lemurs for 25 years and knows what he's talking about.
It actually took 29 scientists coming together from 6 different countries to properly identify
this animal as a new species, seeing as identifying a new lemur from all the other species is
a huge undertaking.
Nobody is sure how many of these critters are left in the wild or how much longer they’ll
be around for.
9: Frog with Fangs In the Philippines, a new species of frog
has just been found and it is absolutely bizarre.
Scientists have discovered a fanged frog.
That's right, it's a frog that has fangs like a vampire.
And believe it or not, there are actually 75 recognized species of fanged frogs already
living in the world.
They can be found all the way from India to China, all throughout Thailand and Malaysia,
and even down into Borneo and Sumatra.
This particular fanged frog was found in the central Philippines, and it was hard to identify
because of its similarities to other fanged frogs found on the island of Palawan.
How did researchers identify it as a new species?
They had to fully analyze the genome of the frog.
What they discovered is that the species had been looking them right in the eyes for the
past 100 years, since biologists had known they were there but hadn't known they were
different from other frogs.
I guess a lot of frogs look the same, even to frog researchers!
To the untrained eye, of course, they look completely identical.
But when scientists looked deep into their DNA, they found differences that make them
unique.
And in case you were wondering, fanged frogs don’t feed on blood and they aren’t dangerous.
They just so happen to have fangs!
I wonder what I would do if I had fangs.
What do you think you’d do?
Would you even want to?
It might be cool for a little while, but it might also get in the way of eating some of
your favorite foods.
It’s a tough call!
8: Translucent Cave Snail A strange new snail has been found deep inside
of a mysterious cave in Croatia.
It's a translucent snail that belongs to a family of land snails with absolutely no visual
orientation, meaning they basically can't see.
But that’s okay, lots of animals can’t see, because they live in the dark!
These snails live exclusively in caves and are hidden from the world at a depth of nearly
3000 feet (900m) beneath the surface, living inside of rock chambers where humans don't
dare wander.
This snail is very fragile, it has a translucent shell, and only a single living specimen has
ever been found.
As of right now, scientists don't know much about the snail.
After all, they've only found one of them.
They believe the snails probably live in the mud and have limited mobility.
For all we know right now, this could be the only snail of its kind, endemic to this particular
cave system.
That would be kind of sad, though, being the only snail of its species.
It sounds lonely, doesn’t it?
The cave is called Lukina Jama-Trojama, and it's the deepest of its kind anywhere in Croatia,
with a maximum depth of just about 4000 feet (1300m).
The cave is so unique that it has three microclimatic layers.
What this means is that it has three of its own ecological layers where the temperature
and climate is completely different.
This gives almost unlimited possibilities for strange animals to develop, especially
over thousands or millions of years.
7: Frilled Triceratops It’s always a good time when scientists
uncover new dinosaurs!
An entirely new genus and species of horned dino has just been identified in New Mexico
thanks to an incomplete skeleton.
The new dinosaur species is kind of like a frilled triceratops.
It belongs to a group of ceratopsid dinosaurs and lived during the Cretaceous period, some
82 million years ago.
That makes it potentially the oldest member of the group.
Even more interesting is that it’s the smallest member of its group as well, only growing
to be about 15 feet (4.5m) in length.
It may have been the original ancestor of a group of dinosaurs that branched out and
evolved, becoming powerful monsters with horns and strange bone-like shields growing out
of their heads.
The partial skeleton included pieces of skull, arms and hind limbs, and ribs.
It was found inside of a rock formation in New Mexico and roamed North America at a time
when the ecosystem was rich with some of the earliest dinosaur species, including the famous
ankylosaur and some lesser known tyrannosaurus-like dinosaurs, which were hungry carnivores.
6: Mysterious Florida Spider In South Florida, a new species of spider
has been identified and it is terrifying!
It began when a zookeeper in Miami was checking reptile traps around the facility.
It was the zookeeper who first found the mysterious arachnid and took a picture of it.
The zookeeper then showed the photo to the research department at the zoo.
What the researchers found was that the spider did not look like anything in the current
records.
But despite the intrigue, there wasn't much they could do and so the discovery sat on
the backburner for two years until another spider that looked exactly like the first
one was discovered.
After the second discovery, Dr. Rebecca Godwin from the Piedmont College in Georgia was sent
to investigate.
She confirmed the spider as a new species and called it the pine rockland trapdoor spider.
This spider is a specialist that creates burrows underground and can live in them for decades.
She says that these are some of the longest living spiders known to man.
But what's really strange is that the spider has only ever been seen around the Miami Zoo,
which really does seem like a strange place to call home.
Do you think the spider was there first, and then the zoo was built, or do you think the
zoo was there, and the spider moved in?
If it did, it might be one of the most intelligent spiders ever, to know that a zoo was a good
place for animals to live!
5: Hammer-Headed Bat The hammer-headed bat is also known as the
big-lipped bat.
And yes, it is a very real animal.
Even though it almost looks like some kind of flying demon and has even been compared
to the Jersey Devil, it is a real bat.
It eats fruit, and it is in no way aggressive, but it may actually carry the Ebola virus.
Scientists are still investigating, because if it does, it needs to be kept far away from
humans!
The hammer-headed bat is what's known as a megabat and is the largest species native
to Africa.
They have a wingspan of nearly four feet (1.3m) and as someone who doesn't know what they're
looking at, they appear to be nightmare creatures summoned by Dracula himself!
But they are actually quite sweet and docile.
They only live in a small section of central Africa, in swamps and mangrove forest.
What's really interesting is that scientists didn't even know about this bat for a very
long time.
It’s only really been studied extensively in recent years.
The good news is that unlike other megabats, the IUCN has rated the hammer-headed bat as
“least concern,” meaning it’s nowhere near becoming extinct!
4: Talking Dinosaur Mexican paleontologists have found something
that is simply unbelievable.
They have discovered what is believed to be a new species of talking dinosaur that lived
72 million years ago.
This discovery was recently announced by Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History.
The specimen has been given the name Tlatolophus galorum, and it once lived in what is today
the northern state of Coahuila.
Researchers discovered its tail, then they found its skull, and then they discovered
the bony hollow crest that it once used to communicate.
The dinosaur was about 36 feet long (11m), and it was one of the most talkative to have
ever lived.
You're probably wondering just how exactly a dinosaur could have talked.
According to paleontologists, it produced low-frequency sounds very similar to what
elephants produce.
These sounds could have traveled many miles, allowing the dinosaurs to communicate with
each other over vast distances.
They also would have been able to emit sounds to scare off predators.
However, even if humans had been around back then, we probably would not have been able
to hear the sounds they made.
Just like the sounds made by elephants, they were probably at a frequency imperceptible
to the human ear.
3: New Dragons In Brazil, two new dragon species have been
discovered.
Of course, these dragons don't fly or breathe fire.
Instead, they are lizards that look like dragons and live in a dry, dense savanna region of
Brazil called the Cerrado.
The Cerrado is an ecosystem that is being destroyed as we speak by soybean plantations
and charcoal production.
It has been estimated that by 2030, only 3% of the region will remain, meaning these newly
discovered dragon lizards will be long gone.
The area was recently inventoried by biodiversity analysts working with Conservation International.
They recorded 253 reptiles in the Brazilian Cerrado, 103 of which are endemic to the area.
That means that if the area truly is reduced to nothing by 2030, there is a high likelihood
that all 103 reptile species will be eradicated, including the two new little guys just discovered.
These new lizards look a lot like bearded dragons, though not a lot is known about them
because scientists haven't really had a chance to take specimens back to their lab.
How many other species do you think have already gone extinct due to human activity in the
Amazon, that we never even got the chance to discover?
Tell me in the comments below.
Then remember to subscribe to Talltanic for more intense videos!
2: Giant Night Scorpion As if scorpions couldn't get any more terrifying,
a new species of giant night scorpion has just been found in India, in the region of
the Western Ghats.
Scientists working with the Institute of Natural History Education and Research described not
only one new species of scorpion, but seven.
They found bark scorpions in the forest and rock-dwelling scorpions outside the forest,
the latter of which are the most vulnerable to becoming extinct.
Each new species is slightly different, though scientists haven't yet published the specific
traits of each one.
What we know is that the rock-dwelling scorpions are huge and nocturnal.
They’re also not venomous.
What they are is in danger of extinction, which is horrifying considering scorpions
have been living on our planet for the last 400 million years and have barely changed
the entire time, other than shrinking down a bit.
They've lived in the sea, they've grown to be giants that fed on dinosaurs, and now they
are small and live throughout the deserts and forests of the world, with even the newest
species being in danger of vanishing!
1: Giant Water Centipede Even more disturbing than scientists finding
new giant night scorpions is scientists discovering a new giant centipede that happens to be amphibious.
What this means is that we're no longer safe on land or in the water from creepy centipedes
with almost two dozen legs.
The new species is a giant.
It was discovered living on a couple of islands in Japan and is the first new centipede to
be confirmed in nearly 150 years in the land of the rising sun.
Worldwide, it's the third swimming centipede ever discovered.
Get ready to be grossed out because this thing is nasty.
It can grow to be 8 inches long (20cm), which is longer than most people's hands.
It has 20 pairs of legs and is crawling all over the Ryukyu Islands, which are at the
very south of the country, hardly ever visited by human beings.
This is why they weren't found until recently.
Scientists actually collected 7 specimens, suggesting they weren't that difficult to
find; it's just that nobody looked for them.
According to Live Science, researchers found the centipedes hiding under stones at the
bottom of streambeds.
Underwater, they prey on river shrimp.
And when researchers tried to catch them on land, they would dive into the water and swim
away like disgusting little snakes.
The centipedes seem to have adapted extremely well to island life, learning how to swim
through the water and run across the land.
How do you feel about these new creepy crawly monsters?
Let me know in the comments and thanks for watching.
Be sure to hit the subscribe button and don’t miss another amazing video!