New Discovery News

To hear an audio reading of this article listen here: The familiar striped skunk of North America (think of the cartoon Pepé Le Pew) has a lesser-known cousin: the spotted…

On a clear night in 2017, a team of students from Bogor Institute of Agriculture (IPB) set out into a lowland forest on the southwest coast of Java, Indonesia’s most…

Luke Mahler didn’t exactly set out to study lizards that could breathe underwater. But when he and fellow scientist Rich Glor were out on a research expedition in Haiti in…

Sea sponges don’t move. At least, that’s what a lot of people used to think about these aquatic invertebrates. But a new study has upended this assumption, and pushed and…

Researchers have described a new chameleon species from the Bale Mountains of south-central Ethiopia, and say the biodiversity hotspot may harbor even more. Named Wolfgang Böhme’s Ethiopian chameleon (Trioceros wolfgangboehmei),…

Two new species of tiny screech owls from the Amazon and Atlantic rainforests in Brazil have been described by science. "They're cute little owls, probably five or six inches long…

The kitefin shark is a guitar-sized creature with brownish-black skin and large, gaping eyes. But there is more to this shark than initially meets the eye: in the dark, it will…

Becca Brunner was standing chest-deep in an Ecuadoran rainforest stream, holding up audio equipment as she recorded the high-pitched call of an elusive glass frog. But then she encountered something…

  On an expedition in the tepuis, or “sprouting rock,” landscape of the Guiana Highlands in South America, Mateusz Wrazidlo snapped a photo of an orchid he had never seen…

1. The ocean in a worldwide pandemic As the year that challenged the world with a widespread pandemic draws to a close, COVID-19 has affected almost every aspect of life…

MANILA — In 2017, a group of researchers surveying mollusks in a popular ecotourism site east of the Philippine capital stumbled upon a tiny land snail with a unique “upside…

ALBAY, Philippines — Spotting false geckos in the wild can be hard. They can easily disappear into their environment thanks to their cryptic colors and markings and their use of…

There’s a new kid in town: a gray-furred langur with white-rimmed eyes and a fluffy head has just been announced as a new primate species. The Popa langur (Trachypithecus popa),…

Researchers have just made a remarkable discovery in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park in Australia. While mapping the seafloor off the coast of far north Queensland state, scientists onboard…

A new tiny orchid species with fiery orange flowers has been discovered on a mountain peak in the northern Philippines’ Cordilleras range. The wild orchid species was named Dendrochilum ignisiflorum…

Outer space, the ocean depths and quantum physics are areas ripe for discovery, the underexplored frontiers of science. But another frontier may be hidden in plain sight, right under your…

For six decades, 28 crickets from the Philippines have been stored in natural history collections at a U.S. museum, unidentified. Now, they finally have names, thanks to a new study.…

PALAWAN, Philippines — Deep in the forests of Palawan, the biodiverse island in the western Philippines, a plethora of plant species thrive. Many are so rare and astonishingly beautiful that…

In the Wai‘anae Mountains, a range on the western side of O‘ahu, Hawaii, a group of scientists were surveying the land for tiny, terrestrial snails when they came across something…

The St. Augustine Alligator Farm Zoological Park in Florida prides itself on having every species of alligator and crocodile in the world. By 2019, scientists had recognized 26 crocodilian species…

Filipino lepidopterist Jade Aster T. Badon is accustomed to traveling to some of the remotest parts of the Philippines in search of new butterfly species. In August 2019, he made…

Scientists have discovered a new insect-eating pitcher plant, Nepenthes cabanae, in the Philippines’ southern Mindanao region. Thriving in a small area within a known conflict zone, the pitcher plant has…

MANILA — It took a closer look at the male jumping spiders’ reproductive organ – the shape of it, to be precise — for two Filipino scientists to declare three…

A 66-million-year-old fossil has allowed scientists to describe a bizarre new species of mammal that lived in Madagascar during the time of the dinosaurs. They’ve christened it Adalatherium hui, which in Malagasy…

JAKARTA — Scientists have described a new bird species found only on the Indonesian island of Alor, where a growing human population is already encroaching on the bird’s volcanic habitat.…

In 1981, a team of scientists led by zoologist Shyamrup Biswas discovered the Namdapha flying squirrel (Biswamoyopterus biswasi) in the ironwood jungles of Arunachal Pradesh state, India. Little did they…

When Rohan Pandit and Wangchu Phiang accidentally stumbled upon a brown snake on a steep slope of a forest in the northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh in India, little did…

JAKARTA — Less than a decade after the world was introduced to the latest species of Asian leaf-warblers, a new songbird of that group has now been described by scientists.…

There isn’t much primary forest left in eastern Africa. In Mozambique, there’s officially none, according to 2015 numbers from the Food and Agriculture Association (FAO) of the UN. But a…

HO CHI MINH CITY - Two new Camellia species, a type of tea plant common to East Asia, Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent, have been discovered in a protected…