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German Scientist Discovers New Insect Order
iphayd writes: "An entomologist in Germany has discovered the first species in a new order of insects. National Geographic News has a story here. The new species, called 'the gladiator,' is a 'cross between a stick insect, a mantid, and a grasshopper.'"
"This discovery is comparable to finding a mastodon or saber-toothed tiger," said Piotr Naskrecki, director of Conservation International's new Invertebrate Diversity Initiative
Yes, except either of those animals could a) smush you, or b) gore you... this little guy will just creep-you-out! "Ew, get it off! get it off!"
Live to Code, Code to Live!
Why not post an informational article about mathematics or information theory that might actually enrich or prove beneficial to the careers of Slashdot's readers?
The occasional reminder from the natural world about the strange things that actually happen in defiance of all the best theoretical simplifications is never a bad thing.
For the record, this new class of insect ranks somewhere between the Coelacanth and the Wollemi Pine on at least a couple of measures of significance. In both those cases the media got quite excited.
On the Linnaean kingdom-phylum-class-order-family-genus-species scale, the Coelacanth ranks as the only living member of class actinistia which shares a closer common ancestor with the tetrapods (including us) than does any other fish in the ocean. However the Woolemi Pine only ranks as a new genus of the Araucariaceae family, and any common ancestor with us is clearly much further in the past than that of this new insect "gladiator".
Seeing as the Linnaean txonomy project has been ongoing since Carl Linnaeus published his Systema Naturae in 1735, the illusion of completeness at higher levels ensures newsworthiness when something is discovered for which the closest related fossils known are tens of millions of years old.
So I really do see a similarities between finding a new bug in the Brandberg Mountains of Namibia and finding a new bug in software that had been running successfully for years.
BTW, I have no idea how anybody could imagine that calling a story "homosexual" would deter many Slashdot readers.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
Actually, size has nothing to do with the difficulty in find them. In fact, we just "Discovered" a huge (13 meter) octopus the other day because one happened to be caught in a fishing net. Nobody even suspected this species.
On the other hand, there are several species that are know from the fossil record but are presumed to be extinct (like this insect.)
The most notable one is the Celocanth (Ancient Fish) which is almost unchanged from it's fossil records (70 million years old) but was "first" found in the ocean in the 1930's.
It's my Sig and you can't have it. Mine! All Mine!
Maybe this is the first time that a German discovered these things. For all we know, the Nambians have known about them for 1000 years and already have a name for them ...