A beautiful scan of a wasp, showing its internal organs outlined in various neon colours on a balck background. Its eyes are picked out in blue, its body in orange, while its large feather-like wings are in bright yellow.

The new species described this year range from minute wasps to great hulking dinosaurs.

© Andrew Polaszek

Museum scientists described 351 new species in 2022

Author:: By Josh Davis
Date Published:: First published 30 December 2022
Date Last Updated:

This year Museum scientists have described and named 351 species new to science.

A huge diversity of animals and plants have been named, from moss animals and dinosaurs, to stick insects and minerals, not to mention an impressive 85 new species of wasps.

With biodiversity around the world declining at an ever-increasing rate, it has never been more important to describe as much of the natural world as possible in order to protect it.

A silver fish with darker stripes running along its bosy, a large fin on its back and belly. — A new species of cichlid fish, Lethrinops atrilabris, described from southern Lake Malawi.

©Turner, 2022

We can't protect what we don't know and with over a million species on Earth threatened with extinction it has never been more important to figure out exactly what life we share this planet with.

Over the past 12 months, Museum curators, researchers and scientific associates have described a total of 351 new species. Every single one of these species is a vital component in the complex network of life known as biodiversity.

The start of this month saw government ministers from around 200 countries gather in Montreal, Canada, at the COP15 biodiversity talks to settle on a new agreement on how best to protect the natural world.

For that agreement to succeed, those making these decisions need the most fundamental data from which to work. Part of this is supplied by researchers, including those at the Museum who are working to describe and name new species.

From research trips to remote locations, to combing through the 80 million objects held in the Museum collections, each year scientists are adding to this extensive library of life.

While many of these species will already be known to those who live alongside them, by giving them scientific names we can hopefully better protect them.

It's the little things

As most animals on Earth are invertebrates (animals without a backbone) it is not surprising that the majority of new species described this year fall into this group.

Looking directly down on a big, silvery beetle. It has big balck pinchers. — An unexpected discovery, the large beetle Autocrates lini was found in the mountainous region of Dayaoshan in China.

© Hu, Drumont & Telnov, 2022

This has included some 84 species of beetle, 34 species of moths, 23 species of moss animals (also known as bryozoans) and 13 species of trematode worms. There were also 12 new species of protists, seven species of flies, two bumblebees from Asia, two polychaete worms from the depths of the oceans and a centipede with a number of segments that has never been seen by scientists before.

But the group that gained the most new species this year is the wasps. A total of 85 new species were described! This includes some miniature individuals with the most beautiful, feather-like wings. These tiny animals belong to a group containing some of the smallest insects in the world.

Despite their diminutive size, these parasitic wasps might be important for agriculture. The insects parasitise the eggs of thrips (a type of insect that can cause crop damage) and as such the wasps may be important biological control agents.

A beautiful scan of a wasp, showing its internal organs outlined in various neon colours on a balck background. Its eyes are picked out in blue, its body in orange, while its large feather-like wings are in bright yellow. — The minute parasitoid Megaphragma wasps could be important biological control agents.

© Andrew Polaszek

A chunky green stick insect holding on to a branch. — There were 19 new species of of stick insect from Australia described this year, including Candovia wollumbinensis.

© Paul Brock

Dr Gavin Broad is the Principal Curator in Charge of Insects at the Museum and an expert in Hymenoptera, the group that contains wasps.

'It's no surprise that new wasp species came out on top, it's just a surprise that wasps don't come top every year,' explains Gavin. 'The abundance of parasitoid wasps makes the order Hymenoptera the most species-rich order of insects, but its is way behind some other groups in terms of actual species descriptions.'

'Watch out for lots more wasps next year!'

This year also has seen 19 new species of stick insects described. All of these hailed from the tropics of Australia and required the researchers to use newly collected insects, museum specimens and genetic analysis to reveal that what was originally thought to be 11 species were actually 30.

A handful of vertebrates have also been described by Museum scientists, including a new species of gecko from the Seychelles, three species of fish and seven species of frogs.

Six of these frogs are some of the smallest known vertebrates. Found living in the leaf litter of Mexico, the frogs grow to just eight millimetres in length, which is smaller than a 1p coin. Why these frogs have evolved to be so small is not yet understood.

Reading the rocks

Scientists have not only been describing the living this year, but also the dead.

Three new species of dinosaurs have been named. Two are armoured dinosaurs from China. The first of these is the oldest and most complete armoured dinosaur found in Asia, while the other is the oldest ever stegosaur. Together, the two species are helping researchers better understand how the heavily armoured group evolved.

The third new dinosaur described this year is a carnivorous species with tiny arms, found in northern Argentina. Dating to 70 million years old, it is giving clues as to how this part of the world responded to the asteroid that wiped the dinosaurs out.

It isn't only dinosaur fossils that are helping researchers better understand the past. A 200-million-year-old fossil lizard that was hiding in the collections turned out not only to be a new species, but also the oldest lizard known to science, pushing the origins of this group back by up to 30 million years.

An artists reconstruction of a fossil tuatara. It looks a lot like a lizard, coloured oranage and green. In the image the tuatara is eating a large insect. — The description of the lizard-like Opisthiamimus gregori from the US helped reveal why its kind were rapidly pushed to the edge of extinction.

© Matthew Carrano.

An artists reconstruction of a sea urchin-like echinoderm. It is a burnt orange-y colour, with purple splodges and lines running along it to a central point. — The echinoderm Yorkicystis haefneri from York, Pennsylvania, is notable not only as it is a new species, but also an entirely new genus.

© Zamora et al. 2022

Also in the collections was a fearsome crocodile-like predator, originally unearthed some five decades ago, that would have stalked what is now Tanzania during the Triassic Period.

Researchers have also been busy describing eight new species of ancient mammals, known mainly from their teeth. Two of these new species would have been darting around the undergrowth and along the branches above the heads of dinosaurs during the Middle Jurassic. The six other new species are early representatives of the group that contains our own primate relatives and would have been living in what is now the Isle of Wight some 35 million years ago.

A small beetle preserved in amber. It has an orange hue and a yellow glow from behind it. — The tiny Ukrainian beetle Ptilodactyla odnosum has been preserved in amber for 35 million years.

© Telnov et al. 2022

One of the most interesting fossil finds this year is a tiny beetle trapped in Ukrainian amber also dating to 35 million years ago. Known as a toe-winged beetle, this particular group of insects is now only found in the tropics and subtropics, with the fossil beetle revealing that the climate in Ukraine must have been much milder when the insect was alive during the Late Eocene.

The new fossil beetle was described by an international team of researchers from the Czech Republic, Latvia, Russia, Ukraine and the United Kingdom as a show of international collaboration in the face of the ongoing war in Ukraine.

'We considered it important to stay together to assist one another and achieve best possible result as a team, despite the present situation,' explains Dr Dmitry Telnov, a Curator of beetles at the Museum. 'With this discovery we do not sort or judge any colleagues, but send a clear message to the scientific community that staying united and supporting one another is how the war can be finished.'

There have been a couple of new species of fossil fish, plus a slightly unusual new species named after the trace fossil of a Jurassic ghost shark egg case. Staying in the oceans, there have been three new species of trilobites, four new species of sea scorpions and a curious armoured worm that has filled a major gap in the fossil record.

Finally, three new species of minerals were described this year, including one with brittle translucent blue crystals called Bridgesite that was discovered in Cumbria, United Kingdom.

The dried leaves of a plant on a neautral background. The leaves are large, with irregular edges, but what catches the eye are the rows upon rows of large spines on the underside of each leaf and along the stem. — Described from the island of Sulawesi, Indonesia, it is thought that Solanum sulawesi might be endemic, meaning it is found nowhere else in the world.

© Naturalis Biodiversity Center

Green and mighty

Finally, there have been a number of new species from the plant and algal world.

A close up of an alga that looks like the stems of a green plant. They form an almost cage-like structure, with bright orange fleshy parts intermixed. — This newly named alga, Lamprothamnium sardoum, lives in the brackish wetlands on the island of Sardinia, Italy.

© R. Becker

Researchers described a total of 11 new species of algae this year, both fossil and living, while four new species of plants were described from across southern Asia, including one from Sulawesi that's covered in rather fearsome looking spines.

Dr Sandra Knapp is a Merit Researcher at the Museum and was involved with the description of these new plant species.

'Although flowering plants are relatively well known as far as groups of organisms go, it is estimated that even though we have given about 450,000 species scientific names, there are about 25% of that left to describe. Not to discover - for sure, these things we don't know about are known by local and Indigenous peoples where they occur - we taxonomists just give them names that put them into the language of global botany.'

'Most plants have a variety of names, some specific to an area or language group, others more widespread, but the scientific names we coin can be used by anyone anywhere. This means there is a common language, one of the things we really need to help bend the curve for biodiversity.'

'After all, if we can't talk about a species, how can we wish to save it?'

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