Free your Imagination

 

I have just found brilliant blogspot - “Free your Imagination… Species discovered this millennium and other natural wonders.” http://zaxy.wordpress.com/ It provides Positive Change via Positive News The site brings together just a few of the hundreds and hundreds of new species discovered since the year 2000. “Hopefully, it will inspire us to see the world as a place still being explored, and give us the courage to conserve and protect the fragile, shrinking areas of habitat left on Earth... areas which, as we see here, contain creatures we haven't even yet Imagined... “

This is exactly the sort of site that I adore. As readers of my various blogs will know I enjoy telling my readers about new species when come across them on the BBC science website and so on but this is so much more comprehensive.


Among the latest species is an Indonesian lungless frog that breathes through its skin (described as looking like “a squished version of Jabba the Hut“).


Another is an elephant shrew called the Grey-faced Sengi. Elephant shrews are only found in Africa. They were originally described as shrews because they superficially resembled shrews in Europe and in America. In fact, the creature is more closely related to a group of African mammals, which includes elephants, sea cows, aardvarks and hyraxes, having shared a common ancestor with them about 100 million years ago. This new sengi has the super scientific name of Rhynchocyon udzungwensis, and stands head and shoulders above other elephant shrews, weighing in at 1½ pounds and being about 25 percent larger than any other known sengi.

Even in Britain new species are still being discovered and a fly new to science was found in the Cairngorms in 2007.