The fate of Steller's sea cow

The known history of Steller's sea cow is well known, tragic, and short.  In 1741, naturalist Georg Wilhelm Steller was shipwrecked on Bering Island.  This is one of the Komandorski Islands, which lie between Kamchatka and the Aleutians. There he and his companions met the sea cow.  It was a huge plant-eating mammal, up to 35 feet long, with a bilobed tail like a whale's and a placid disposition that made it easy to approach (and to harpoon).   After Steller's crew finally returned to civilization, sealers and other voyagers began stopping off in the sea cow's haunts to slaughter the inoffensive mammals for their meat.   By 1768, the species had apparently been hunted to extinction.

There are a few odd data bits about the sea cow that hint-just hint - it hung on a little longer.  Native hunters reported killing them as late as 1780. Early Russian colonizers of Bering Island reported sighting sea cows in the 1830s.  Fifty years later, the explorer Nordenskiold returned from the region with a sea cow skeleton of unknown age and a tale of a live sighting from 1854.  In 1910, fishermen in Russia's Gulf of Anadyr reported a sea cow stranded on the beach, but the report was never investigated. Other Russian sightings in 1962 and 1977 came to nought.

Now we have some science indicating that the animal's range was, in fact, greater than we thought - although, alas, they don't hint at survival but at an earlier extirpation event.    It extended, not west or south as sometimes suggested, but north to Alaska's St. Lawrence Island. Bones collected from the island were spotted at a handicrafts show in faraway Atlanta, Georgia (USA), having been made into knife handles, and the provenance traced to St. Lawrence.  They were analyzed by the team of Lorelei D. Crerar , Andrew P. Crerar , Daryl P. Domning , and E. C. M. Parsons.  (They also offer some older history I was unaware of: that "According to the fossil record, animals in the genus Hydrodamalis inhabited coastal waterways from Japan through the Aleutian Island chain to Baja California during the Late Miocene, Pliocene, and Pleistocene. Hydrodamalis gigas was still present in the Aleutian Islands and central California less than 20 000 years ago." )  

The St. Lawrence population was apparently wiped out or driven out by Yup'ik  hunters around 900 AD.  So it is that one of the most fascinating animals in modern history met its fate as the hands of hungry humans: not once, but twice.  

Other references: 

Haley, Delphine.  1978.  "The Saga of Steller's Sea Cow," Natural History, November.

Mackal, Roy.  1980.  Searching for Hidden Animals.  New York: Doubleday.

Stejneger, Leonhard.  1936.  Georg Wilhelm Steller.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard  Press.

New species swing in

As I like to point out, we get a lot of new species every year. Most are tiny invertebrates you wouldn't notice even if you stepped on them (especially since you would be on the bottom of the ocean and therefore drowning), but the mammals, birds, sharks, etc. keep coming too.

A Field Museum expedition to a white-sands forest - an environment I didn't know existed - came up with three new plants, four frogs, four fish, and a titi monkey of striking coppery appearance  made of which one scientist said, "none of the experts... have seen this coloration before, and there isn't anything like it in the Museum."

Never stop exploring!

Book review: The Species Seekers

The Species Seekers: Heroes, Fools, and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth
Richard Conniff
W. W. Norton & Company (2010)

In this excellent book, Richard Conniff introduces us to the scientists, naturalists, dilettantes, and others (from the brilliant to the crazy) who contributed so much to the natural history we know. While the focus is on zoology as developed by European and American seekers, this also works as a history of the natural sciences in the 18th and 19th centuries. This period saw hunting for new species raised to a manic level it's never attained before or since. When professional scientists were few, species-hunters came from every walk of life - doctors, sea captains, hunters, and women, who didn't get their due then and don't really get it now. (I had no idea that Beatrix Potter, creator of Peter Rabbit, was a bona fide expert on the fungi who was shunned by organized science in England.) Conniff creates an especially vivid portrait of Mary Kingsley (who died young in 1900), who was as daring a field collector as anyone. 
I've often thought a book could be written strictly on the scientific contributions of missionaries: Conniff does not neglect them, recounting Father Armand David's many daring discoveries in China. The famous names like Darwin are here, of course, but along the way we also meet such men as Walter Rothschild, who proved a hopelessly incompetent banker (the family has basically erased him from its history) but a keen naturalist and a funder of major collecting expeditions: Paul Du Chaillu, who made countless real contributions but also created the myth of ferocity among gorillas, and the men and women who supported the more famous naturalists (one item that sticks in my mind is Sir Richard Owens' wife's diary entry about coming home to find a dead rhinoceros in her no-doubt-immaculate front hall.) 
Some of the naturalists here may have hastened the demise of species by taking specimens seemingly without limit, but others foresaw the need to start protecting the natural world. Their discoveries also contributed greatly to the development of the idea of natural selection and to its subsequent refinement. Conniff presents this in roughly chronological order, and it's fascinating to follow the narrative as naturalists slowly put the pieces together and began to understand such concepts as ecosystems and natural selection pressures.  Conniff gives us these people as they lived, not ducking the racism, sexism and imperialism that plagued even the greatest minds of the day, but not wallowing in it either. This thoroughly researched and superbly written book is a time machine to the great era of species-hunting, and I cannot imagine any student of the natural sciences who will not enjoy the ride immensely.

The Skeptic and the Sasquatch

I haven't spent much time on sasquatch lately.  I'd have snorted "impossible" and closed the file a long time ago if it wasn't for the uncomfortable fact that there are sober, intelligent citizens who insist they've gotten a good look at it.

The investigators for the North American Wood Ape Conservancy (NAWAC) (who I always liked, even if their name implies preexisting belief in a "wood ape," for renaming the phenomenon so they could start fresh) didn't get a close look, but they did what is, compared to most of the dreck in this business, a very careful investigation over a four-year period that collected a lot of secondary evidence, from thermal images to rock-throwing, that couldn't be easily explained. I still would have passed it by if it were not for Sharon Hill, a geologist and a well-respected, smart skeptic who runs  the Doubtful News blog. Sharon read the report and agreed that a lot of this was very puzzling and needed answers to questions like (my wording) "Who trekked many miles into the wildest part of Oklahoma just to heave rocks at bigfoot hunters?" She wrote a very good post on it.

She has never, and does not now, endorse sasquatch as a real animal. She looked objectively at the report and agreed the investigators seemed sincere, didn't leap to conclusions, and had genuinely puzzling experiences.  (Here's the report.)

Well, you'd think Sharon had come out foursquare for demon-hunting, poltergeists, and New Age medicine.  Some of the comments from fellow skeptics focused on the report itself ("chock full of assumptions" was one fairly reasonable line) and others dismissed Sharon's seeming indulgence of such nonsense. One skeptic dismissed it with, "I'm astounded that any of this could be considered evidence."  

Now there are a lot of sincere people looking for sasquatch, and there are a lot of publicity-seeking idiots, and there are certainly hoaxers.  And missing one of the largest species in North America seems, on the face of it, not possible.  But the response went a little - well, unscientific.  No one accused Sharon directly of being an idiot, but a lot of them implied it, and, while some did read the original report, others flatly refused to.   (My favorite line posted in defense of the investigation was,  "Drunken hillbillies would have to be little more than brain dead to be hanging out in this very remote area, over a four year period, looking for an opportunity to throw rocks at investigators who are brandishing rifles.") As Sharon put it, “Several people misunderstood my approach. I have gained much information and understanding by not being hostile or dismissive to those on the metaphorical “other side of the fence”. I’m not out to debunk Sasquatch. I wish to understand what people are experiencing and why they conclude this creature is real.”

The point I'm getting at here is that Sharon considered the evidence and published a well-reasoned, objective review knowing full well that it would not go over well with some of her friends.  Her approach was scientific, just as it was when she destroyed the Melba Ketchum idiocy. The NAWAC people have not proven sasquatch exists: they have proven they encountered a lot of puzzling incidents. That's all Sharon said. Fellow skeptics shouldn't be taking her to the woodshed for it.

Press on, my friend.

An interview with Cryptomundo.com

One of the most popular cryptozoology sites, host for some great debates, is www.cryptomundo.com.  So I was happy to answer questions posed by moderator Craig Woolheater about my novel The Dolmen, which I think of as horror but certainly has a cryptozoological premise.

Craig carried an announcement when it came out and has now followed up by posting the interview. Thank you!

Seas, Sharks, and Serpents

My current nonfiction project is a tome on the discovery and legends of marine life, covering creatures new, remarkable, and mythical.  The idea is to present the wondrous discoveries we're making in the context of our long and fractious love affair with the oceans themselves.

I was originally hoping for 2014, but that date went by pretty fast. I'd hoped to get it out this year, but no luck: there's just too much recent material to digest. So here we are looking at early 2016.  I hate missing deadlines, but there's a good reason: to make the book better.

Ownards!

Add a new moth to your closet.

Thanks to correspondent Laurence Clark Crossen, I need to add another newly discovered species, the enigma moth of Australia's Kangaroo Island.  The tiny, handsome gold and purple moth is referred to (inaccurately) as a "living dinosaur moth." What's special about it? It carries many "primitive" traits that go tens of millions of years back in moth evolution. So scientists are very happy to see it alive. (I don't know what a "living dinosaur moth" would actually look like - maybe like Mothra in the Godzilla movies? )

Exciting new species - as usual

If this blog has a purpose, it's to remind people there are still discoveries to make in the natural universe, from Earth's jungles to the remotest stars.

So we have some things to celebrate!

First, from Myanmar, welcome back Jerdon's babbler (Chrysomma altirostre altirostre). This bird, perhaps overlooked because it's one of the hundreds of species ornithologists refer to, sometimes despairingly, as LBJs (little brown jobs), vanished 73 years ago.  Scientists have just published the news that they rediscovered the bird last year in the Bago region of Myanmar.  They targeted it by looking for patches of suitable habitat (grassland, in this case)  in the known range that had not been logged, burned, developed, or otherwise ravaged in the interim.

Now we've got even bigger news, a new primate. There are over 30 species of the diminutive monkeys called titis (genus Callicebus) in South America.  The largest are not even a half-meter long, and several species look considerably alike (known as cryptid species), all of which makes discovery a challenge. Nevertheless, the challenge has been met.  Welcome Callicebus miltoni, unmistakable with its long orange tail.

I can't find non-copyrighted photos of either yet, but follow the links and meet our new (and old) neighbors!

I'm back - literally

Friends,

This blog has not been update in some weeks.  I must plead distraction: I was preparing from back surgery and then recovering from it.  I'm back!

And speaking of bones like the ones my surgeon was messing with, here's a great photo my daughter took of the Dunkleosteus skull in the museum on the University of Nebraska campus, where she attends.
Onwards!

Pick a Peck of Paleontology Postings

There's a lot going on in the world of long-dead animals.
There doesn't seem to be an end in finding prehistoric species.  We know, logically, that a limited numbers of species have lived on Earth, but we clearly haven't found them all yet, and they just keep coming.
The last few years have given us the biggest bear (we think) that ever lived, Arctotherium angustiden, the biggest snake (the 12-13m Titanoboa), , and the biggest crocodile, Crocodylus thorbjarnarsoni, along with the ancestor of today's sperm whale, who by the way was even more formidable than the modern type.
Then in just the last week we added two discoveries. Scientists exploring the Peruvian area of the Amazon basin found seven species of crocodiles, including three new species, dating back 13 million years (2.5 million years older then the Amazon itself). There have never been as many species of croc living in the same habitat at the same time.  This find dwarfs modern diversity (we don't have more than three crocs in the same area today) and introduced three new animals, including a weird-looking clam hunter with rounded teeth and the snout of a shovel.  As paleontologist Rodolfo Salas-Gismondi put it, "We uncovered this special moment in time when the ancient mega-wetland ecosystem reached its peak in size and complexity, just before its demise and the start of the modern Amazon River system." Wow. Cool.
In the second item passed onto me by my friend Kris Winkler this week, paleontologists are exploring, with exquisite care, a specimen never seen before: a frozen baby woolly rhinoceros. Hunters who found "Sasha" took her for a recent reindeer carcass until they saw the horn. She is estimated at 10,000 years old, and scientists hope she yields high-quality DNA (not to make new rhinos - that is still beyond us - but to sequence the animal's genome and learn far more about it than we know today).   The animal was a contemporary of the famous mammoth, but there's some debate over its appearance.  Not anymore.
Exploration goes in every direction - across time, across space, across the frontiers of the mind. We are privileged to live in  a time with more tools for exploration than any society before us.  We shouldn't waste the opportunity.

The giant snake Titanoboa swallowing a crocodile 

(NASM exhibit photographed by author) 

Goodbye to a hero of science

You can say"heroine" if you want, but I like Sigourney Weaver's argument that a "heroine" is someone who needs rescuing, while the hero is a person who does the rescuing.  Dr. Eugenie Clark tried to rescue the entire ocean system of the planet Earth. The "Shark Lady" was a pioneer of marine biology and exploration, a pathfinder expanding women's role in science, a tireless advocate for conservation, and the woman who brought sharks out of the shadows and showed us how complex and fascinating these "mindless killers" really are.
Clark was born in 1922, of mixed American and Japanese parents.  She grew up in a time when it was hard to be a woman with professional ambitions and even harder to be half-Japanese.  Still, she had a fascination with marine life early on, and her hero was the conservationist and bathyscaphe explorer William Beebe.  By 1950 she was a Ph.D. in marine biology. She had already done her early field work in the South Pacific, where she learned what an important resource local fishermen could be, and at the famed Scripps Institute and the American Museum of Natural History.
That was only the beginning for Dr. Clark.  She published breakthrough work on sharks in professional journals as well as books for popular audiences (I still have an ancient copy of her first, Lady with a Spear),  She was founder and  director of the Cape Haze Marine Laboratory (now the Mote Marine Laboratory)  for shark studies. She took Peter Benchley diving after he published Jaws and helped persuade him to do conservation work to help offset the damage the novel and film have done to sharks. She won an Emmy for her underwater films, cruised with Jacques Cousteau on the Calypso, and taught marine biology at the University of Maryland from 1968 to 1992.  She won countless accolades for her nonstop work on sharks, marine life in general, education, and conservation. Her endless curiosity led to her down such avenues as marine paleontology, riding a 50-foot whale shark, and becoming a founding board member of the International Society of Cryptozoology.

Fair winds and following seas.

Photo More Marine Laboratory

The puzzling Red Planet

Mars has gotten our attention from the ancient days, when it was Ares, the God of War, to the latest probes by rovers and orbiting spacecraft.  While nowhere near Earth's size, it's the only planet in the solar system that might harbor life similar to Earth life.  Therein lies the fascination.
We know the planet has no canals (remember, the search for"canals" on Mars arose from a misinterpretation of the word "canali," applied by Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli in 1877 to  straight lines that, well, don't exist either).  The human eye and the telescopes of the 1800s had limitations, one of which was a tendency to make separated features look like they were making a straight line.
 Ever since the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spotted slopes and "beds"  that looked like they were made by flowing water, we've been looking for more evidence.  These formations might have contributed to the "canali" appearance, but one Mars scientist, American William Hartmann, had already suggested another explanation: the apparent lines, or segments of them, were plumes of dust blowing off peaks in Martian windstorms.  Because of Mars' thin atmosphere, the plumes were highly visible and the dust blew a long ways. That made sense, and some such plumes have been spotted by the Hubble and other instruments, but they don't really explain what what we're seeing right now.
Amateur astronomers in 2012 were the first to spot two plumes, streaming out hundreds of kilometers long and wide and rising 250 km high.  They may be dust or ice, but either way they shouldn't rise so high in the thin atmosphere and low gravity of Mars before becoming so spread out they are invisible.
I'm not going to try to offer a solution here: it's way out of my depth.  But the point to be made is that this is our closest, most studied, and most Earthlike planetary neighbor, and we still don't thoroughly understand it.  We don't know for sure whether it had flowing water, although most planetary scientists think it did in the distant past. We don't know whether there are still occasional surface water flows. We don't know if it's sterile, if it used to harbor life, or if it harbors life now.
The only way to solve all the mysteries of Mars is to go there. NASA these days talks a good game, and their Orion capsule and Space Launch System may be useful pieces of a Mars expedition, but we're not really doing significant work on long-term habitats for humans or on landers that could carry astronauts.  In other words, they're dreaming about a landing in the next two decades, unless they want to start or at least plan real work on the missing pieces.  
Still, someone, someday, will go.  I volunteer.

World's scariest fish? The frilled shark

The frilled shark isn't the biggest of sharks. It has a clean record where maneating is concerned.  So why are its rare appearances greeted with such freaked-out responses from humans?
Basically, the 2m frilled shark, like the goblin shark (which looks nothing like it, but engenders similar responses and may by 5m long, to boot) don't fit our picture of what a shark looks like. The frilled shark instead fits our picture (inaccurate though it may be) of what a prehistoric monster looks like.  With a gill "frill" extending around the body, an elongated shape, and a relatively blunt head with 300 teeth, it doesn't look like a medium-sized, harmless animal, even though it is one.  It simply looks weird, and we go crazy over it (hint to SyFy Channel: an 8m frilled shark would make a great centerpiece for a horror movie.)
Oddly, the head and even the teeth of the frilled shark bear an interesting resemblance to those of the leopard seal. This fierce Antarctic predator (with at least one definite human death to its credit) can be 3m long and has no business looking like a shark. But that's convergent evolution for you.

Hail Columbia: A Last Note on NASA's Day of Remembrance

Recollections... Waking on a clear weekend morning here in Colorado, casually logging on to check my Email, seeing the banner, "NASA Loses Contact With Columbia." Turning on CNN. Watching more CNN. Explaining it to my daughter, then 11. Wondering how it had happened, what it would mean.

The technical answers have long since been settled. The human answers, as always, were not as simple. They drift out in fragments over the course of history, debated, challenged, finally settling but never quite settled.
Worth it? Of course it was not, in a logical sense, worth losing seven people for a science mission whose returns would not have been of great importance. Death, as Ulysses Grant once said of war, "is cruelty and you cannot refine it." Nor can you romanticize it. Nor, when there gross errors in judgment made, can you excuse it.
I submit, however, that any calculation about the worthiness of the voyage is incomplete, nay, unfair, unless it takes into account the desires and motivations of the voyagers. The seven people on Columbia did not just accept the risk of venturing, in a craft built by fallible humans, into the most hostile realm we know. They sought the risk. They spent years training, competing, and demanding the right to take the risk.
Whatever judgments we might make on the costs vs. the returns of their efforts as explorers, the explorers themselves had no doubts. Every one of them was a bright, accomplished, highly educated human being. Not one was foolish enough to think there was no risk. Not one hesitated.
Indeed, they did everything they possibly could to qualify themselves to stand out among their peers and earn the chance to risk their lives in a cause they deemed worthy.
By that standard alone, they were the best our species had to offer. They were sent forth into the last unknown ocean, explorers in an age when most people in their society place high value on safety, comfort, and surety.
Godspeed, Columbia.

The biggest things in the sea

There's a lot of fun (as well as science) involved in wondering just how big various types of marine life can grow. 


Take sharks, for example - specifically, great whites. The maximum size of the great white is a recurring theme on every marine life website (and always will be: people sometimes seem ready to punch each other over a difference of centimeters), but the "McCosker-Ellis Limit" (there, I just named it)  of approximately 7m/22 feet still stands for physically measured sharks.  (Ellis was the first author on the book just cited: somehow, putting it the other way sounds better when I say it. No offense meant, Richard.)
However, I finally took the time to dig up a reference I'd used in my 1995 book Rumors of Existence, an article from Science where Dr. John Randall (who gets credit for being conservative based on his cutting in half the estimates for the extinct giant C. megalodon) reported that bites on a whale carcass indicated a shark of about 7.5m.


This terrific image, this Nat Geo article, and the paper they were based on looked at the biggest creatures of various types (it didn't look at all the orders or families: no one cares what the biggest cycliophoran is, no matter how important is it to science.)  (OK, the answer is about 350 millionths of a meter.)


Everyone will get a bity of an eye-opener: I didn't realize (or had forgotten) that southern elephant seals could weigh a mind-boggling 5mt, or that a whale shark had been measured at 18.8m.  On the other hand, the authors shrunk the giant squid, widely reported at 17-18m, to 12m: the longer figures, they believe, were based on bad measurements and the tendency of observers to stretch the tentacles on stranded specimens out far too much. I am still inquiring about the nearly 24m sperm whale: other sources put the record at 20.7m, ascribed to a bull killed in 1950. Ellis' book The Great Sperm Whale mentions that there are two teeth 28cm/11in long in a museum, where the normal length is 20cm/8 inches: perhaps they were extrapolating.


We think of invertebrates (besides the octopus and squid) as small, but there are jellyfish 2m across, barrel sponges 2.5m wide, and isopods (think of the biggest roach you ever saw, give it gills, and blow it up in size) 50cm long. Someone in the comments on the Nat Geo site noted the absence of siphonophores, which are longer than blue whales, but I suppose colonial creatures don't count as one unit.


As an extra note on jellyfish, cryptozoological literature often contains a description of a monster jellyfish weighing at least a metric ton washed onto the bow of the steamer Kuranda in the South Pacific in 1973: the steamer could not get free of it and had to be rescued by a seagoing tug, the Hercules, which washed the mess off with high-pressure hose.  Despite claims a sample was scientifically verified to be a jellyfish, I've given up on this report: it all traces back to a newspaper clipping and nothing else, and all I can document from Web searches is that the Hercules, at least, was a real ship, and that doesn't get us very far. (Author Richard Weiner claims to have seen a 15-m jellyfish while scuba diving on the other side of the world, but that seems to be the only such report, and I set that one, too, aside.) I'm ready to accept around 2m as the max for a jellyfish. 




The authors note these are maximum sizes, and the average is usually much smaller.  But everyone, including me, is fascinated by the upper end.  I went to the Whales: Giants of the Deep museum exhibit and watched children crawl through a blue whale's heart.  For me, the amazement never ends


.

Challenger

All those years ago...29 to be exact... I was driving home after a 27-hour shift as commander of a Titan II ICBM crew in Little Rock, AR, when I heard it on the news. The shuttle Challenger had exploded.
I raced home, and my wife had the TV on. I watched the launch about three times, thinking in missile-man terms about what was happening with the engines, boosters, etc.  Then I pointed to a pink-orange glow between the solid-fuel booster and the main tank.  "That shouldn't be there," I said. I wasn't sure what it was: I just remember saying repeatedly, "It shouldn't be there." Then I decided, "It's either a burn-through from the booster or some kind of hydrogen leak." A few more viewings and the stream of expert and non-expert commentary narrowed it down.  I wondered if the solid fuel had been mispoured or mishandled so there was a crack in it.  It didn't occur to me at first that joint was bad: I'd seen a lot of solid-fuel rockets and missiles, in person and on TV, and I'd never seen or even read about a problem with a joint.

It turned out almost no one suspected the joint. Almost.
Goodbye Ellison, Christa, Greg, Judy, Mike, Dick, and Ron.    It may be presumptuous to call them by their first names when I never met any of them.  But we all knew them. 
They were us.
Ad Astra.

Celebrating Tetrapod Zoology's 9th Birthday!

Dr. Darren Naish has published his blog, now carried by Scientific American, for nine years now. In that time, Tetrapod Zoology has opened countless drawers in the great vault of Nature, presenting us with current, insightful analysis of new animal discoveries, mysteries, cryptozoological claims, advances in taxonomy, and controversies. He has T-shirts (throughout Western civilization, T-shirts are an important mark of having arrived!), podcasts, and even a comic series with Ethan Kocak that explores  topics you and I have never thought to write a comic about, from the name of the white rhino (which is decidedly not white) to the antics of a sloth that likes to break into outhouses and eat the contents (really).  There's also a book taken directly from the blog and other books contributing to new views of dinosaurs and of the creatures of cryptozoology.  Oh, and in his not-so-secret identity as a dedicated paleontologist, he's also found time to describe a new species of sauropod dinosaur among other scientific papers created or contributed to.  His publication list is darned impressive..


Darren can be blunt about lousy science, he can be funny, he can be wrong (and admit it), and he can be sternly dismissive (as with the wilder claims of cryptozoology).  He can also, however, embrace the mysterious and the weird.  He holds open the possibility there is an undiscovered long-necked pinniped behind some "sea serpent" tales, has speculated on a giant form of orangutan behind unknown-primate reports in SE Asia,  and is always open to new ideas.  That makes him one of the few Ph.D's willing to listen to everyone in the complex, cacophonous, overlapping worlds of zoology, cryptozoology, and paleontology.


So congratulations, Darren, and many more years! 

New species of 2014

There are several collections of species described in 2014, but here is the International Institute for Species Exploration's list of the Top 10. Keep in mind this is 10 out of approximately 18,000! 
Pride of place goes to the impossibly cute Olinguito  (Bassaricyon neblina), a round-faced, furry raccoon relative from the Andes (Columbia and Ecuador).  Scientists complain that too much attention is given to "charismatic species," mostly mammals, but the fact is you can get people to contribute money to save habitat for pandas, and you can't do that for a new earthworm, so a new poster animal is welcome. 
The only other vertebrate on the list is the leaf-tailed gecko.  The others are small invertebrates, with the striking exception of Kaweesak's Dragon Tree from Thailand - a beautiful tree that can be 12m tall. 
Return to a moment to that figure of 18,000 and remember that this is pretty typical. We haven't run out of new creatures to find. What we are running out of, in far too many cases, is time. 

Olinguito (photo Smithsonian)

Event for Colorado readers: Extreme Life of the Sea

The Extreme Life of the Sea is a superb book: I gave it five stars on Amazon.  These authors are in Boulder tonight and at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science tomorrow night. Weather permitting, I'll be at the Museum meeting! 

http://www.dmns.org/learn/adults/after-hours/the-extreme-life-of-the-sea/

Loss of two coelacanth conservationists

Every year, American cryptozoologist Loren Coleman posts a list of the most significant deaths related to cryptozoology.  This year, he also published an update (link here) which included two deaths I wasn't aware of. 
Leading South African diver and conservationist Peter Timm, who discovered the South African population of the coelacanth in 2000, died 18 June 2014 along with his dive partner, Adele Steegen,  in an accident while trying to recover lost scientific equipment in 58m of water. Both divers had done important work in filming and protecting coelacanths in the years since Timm's discovery.  
The coelacanth was an enormous scientific find in 1938 and, in essence, the founding fish of cryptozoology, since it's been used ever since as an example of an animal of significant size that dropped out of the fossil record 60M years ago and reappeared in the modern era. (There are two claims now of post-Mesozoic coelacanth fossils.)  The coelacanth has actually been cited too much, in my opinion, by cryptozoologists - as important and startling as it was, no other large fish has been discovered after such a long absence. Nor has any other type of marine or terrestrial vertebrate. Still, the Javan and South African populations of the coelacanth (the Javan being classed as a separate species) both rank as very important discoveries and welcome news to conservationists who feared the modern coelacanth was confined to one population.
Farewell, Mr. Timms and Ms. Steegen.  You did your part for the future of planet Earth. 

Coelacanth (MarineBio.org)