When plant systematist Elliot Gardner first began collecting samples of a fruit-bearing tree in Malaysian Borneo, he thought he was looking at just one species. Western taxonomists had long considered…
What’s in a name? The curious case of a nameless grasshopper will tell you that there is more to a name than meets the eye. To declare a species as…
The article has been significantly amended in light of challenges to both the research itself and Mongabay's coverage of the journal article. If you get yourself a map of Peninsular…
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…
Let’s be honest: many conservationists may start their careers with big ambitions. But as they, and their careers, age, those ambitions — especially in light of the Anthropocene — understandably…
For more than 180 years, several soft-nosed chameleons from Madagascar sat together in a single species complex (Calumma nasutum) until scientists decided to take a closer look. They disentangled the…
A new subspecies of fin whale, the second-largest species on Earth after the blue whale, has been discovered by scientists in the Pacific Ocean. There are currently three recognized subspecies…
A tiny fish described in 2013 from a stream in Sri Lanka was apparently a known species that had been moved there years earlier, according to a study that underscores…
Most of us expect museum specimens to be accurately labelled and meticulously catalogued. But up to half of the world’s natural history specimens could have wrong names, according to a…
Giant clams are among the more easily spotted invertebrates of the marine realm. However, some are actually quite cryptic and distinct species are often difficult to identify, claims a study…
The 2013 Zoos and Aquariums: Committing to Conservation (ZACC) conference runs from July 8th—July 12th in Des Moines, Iowa, hosted by the Blank Park Zoo. Ahead of the event, Mongabay.com…
In a single paper, a team of researchers have succinctly described 101 new species of weevils from New Guinea, more than doubling the known species in the beetle genus, Trigonopterus.…
Scientists from Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok and the Natural History Museum, London recently discovered three new species of carnivorous snails in northern Thailand. However, the celebration of these discoveries is tainted…
A small, boneless creature, that lives underground, with a "hundred" legs, and a rather powerful sting; some of these creatures are drab, but some are so beautiful and brightly colored…
Searching through materials at the Natural History Museum in Paris, Simon van Noort recently came across a long-neglected field box of wasp specimens. Collected 80 years earlier by André Seyrig…
New species of agama lizard discovered in remote rainforest in Vietnam: Calotes bachae. Photo by Peter Geissler. A bold new paper in Science argues that the world's species could be…
Gray mouse lemur (Microcebus murinus) in Madagascar. Photo by: Rhett A. Butler. Spanning the gamut from mouse lemurs to mountain gorillas, All The World’s Primates is a comprehensive database of…
Researchers with the Smithsonian have catalogued almost as many crab species on tropical coral reef bits measuring just 20.6 square feet (6.3 square meters) as in all of Europe's seas,…
Unidentified butterfly in Sumatra. Photo by: Rhett A. Butler. Scientists have named, cataloged, and described less than 2 million species in the past two and a half centuries, yet, according…
How many tropical plant species are threatened by climate change? Which plants have big enough ranges to survive a warming world, not to mention deforestation? How likely is it that…
