A 3mm long Moth, which was first found in 2004, has been recognised as a new species!
The micro-moth, which lives in Hembury Woods in Devon is believed to be unique to the UK and not found anywhere else in the world.
The tiny moth, with a wingspan of just 6mm, was first spotted in 2004 by amateur naturalist Bob Heckford.
In January this year (2010), the moth was officially recognised in the journal Zookeys as a new species, and named Ectoedemia heckfordi after its discoverer.
August was a fantastic month for Cryptoworld, with over 20,000 unique (new) visitors and almost 800,000 hits! Unfortunately hits aren’t really a true indication of the amount of visitors to a site, but it would be great if we can top the 1 million mark before the end of the year!
Anyway – the top stories for August are as follows – interestingly a couple of old stories have crept back into the top ten!
Scary Ants?
1) Scary! Ants form Global Mega-Colony
Very Scary: A single mega-colony of ants has colonised much of the world, scientists have discovered. Read the whole start here >>>
2) Mermaid spotted in Israel
Israel was in the grips of mermaid fever in August after numerous sightings of the mythical sea creature off its coast. Read the whole story here >>>
3) Orange balls of light seem over South London
Crowds of people gathered in Balham and Tooting (South London) to watch two sets of orange lights fly in formation across the night sky.
Still a very popular story – now with 75+ comments!!! Read the whole story here >>>
5) Sewer Creature is REAL – but not what you’d expect!
One possible answer – Bloodworms (Tubifex tubifex) – what’s your thoughts? Watch the video here >>>
6) Lights, Lanterns and UFOs!
Lots and lots of people are seeing strange lights all over the world. Here in the UK, there are new sightings on an almost daily basis – but what are they? Read the full story and watch the video here >>>
The Bare-faced bulbul
7) Bald Songbird discovered in Laos
The latest strange creature to emerge from a rugged region of Laos is a bald songbird, dubbed the “bare-faced bulbul”. Read the full story here >>>
8 ) 4 new Thylacine sightings in 3 months!
An old story from June 2006 has crept back up the charts – Four new sighting of the Tasmanian Tiger (Thylacine) have been reported in the last three months on the outskirts of Portland, Southern Australia. Read the whole story here >>>
Helensburgh Big Cat?
9) Big Cat captured on video in Helensburgh, Argyll?
An off-duty Ministry of Defence police dog handler has taken a video of what he claims is a panther-sized big cat. Read the story (with photo) here >>>
10) Cannibal Frog found in Australia
The matchbox-sized green-stripe frog normally eats bugs – but this one swallowed a green tree frog. Read the full story (with photo) here >>>
The latest strange creature to emerge from a rugged region of Laos is a bald songbird, dubbed the “bare-faced bulbul.” Its little-visited habitat, a sparse forest on rugged limestone karsts, is becoming known for unusual wildlife discoveries. Scientists from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and the University of Melbourne discovered the bird while working on a project funded and managed by the MMG (Minerals and Metals Group) mining company, which operates the Sepon copper and gold project in the region.
The bare-faced bulbul gets its name from the lack of feathers on its face and part of its head. It is the only known bald songbird in mainland Asia, according to scientists, and the first new species of bulbul described on the continent in over 100 years. The bulbul family includes about 130 species.
The thrush-sized bird is greenish-olive with a light-colored breast and a distinctive featherless, pink face. The bluish skin around its eye extends to the bill, and a narrow line of hair-like feathers runs down the center of its crown. It appears to primarily dwell in trees. A description of the species has been published in the July issue of the Oriental Bird Club’s journal Forktail. Authors include Iain Woxvold of the University of Melbourne, along with WCS researchers Will Duckworth and Rob Timmins.
The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) announced today the discovery of a new monkey in a remote region of the Amazon in Brazil.
The monkey is related to saddleback tamarins, which include several species of monkeys known for their distinctively marked backs. The newly described distinct subspecies was first seen by scientists on a 2007 expedition into the state of Amazonas in northwestern Brazil.
Researchers have dubbed the monkey Mura’s saddleback tamarin (saguinus fuscicollis mura) named after the Mura Indians, the ethnic group of Amerindians of the Purus and Madeira river basins where the monkey occurs. Historically this tribe was spread through the largest territory of any of the Amazonian Indigenous peoples, extending from the Peruvian frontier today (Rio Yavari) east to the Rio Trombetas.
The monkey is mostly gray and dark brown in color, with a distinctly mottled “saddle.” It weighs 213 grams and is 240 millimeters (9 inches tall) with a 320 millimeter (12.6 inch) tail.
“The Wildlife Conservation Society is extremely proud to be part of this exciting discovery in the Amazon,” said Dr. Avecita Chicchon, Director of WCS’s Latin America Programs. “We hope that the discovery will draw attention to conservation in this very fragile but biodiverse region.”
According to the study’s authors, the monkey is threatened by several planned development projects in the region, particularly a major highway cutting through the Amazon that is currently being paved. Conservationists fear the highway could fuel wider deforestation in the Amazon over the next two decades. Other threats to the region include a proposed gas pipeline and two hydroelectric dams currently in the beginning stages of construction.
“This newly described monkey shows that even today there are still major wildlife discoveries to be made,” said the study’s lead author, Fabio Röhe of the Wildlife Conservation Society. “This discovery should serve as a wake-up call that there is still so much to learn from the world’s wild places, yet humans continue to threaten these areas with destruction.”
Caught during a steamy moment in a lava tunnel in 2006, these two apparently mating bats – members of a new species – are each no bigger than a human thumb!
Weighing just 0.2 ounce (5 grams), Aellen’s long-fingered bat was discovered on a volcanic island in Africa’s Comoros chain. DNA analysis later confirmed the bat as a unique species.
Subsequent genetic tests also revealed the bat is also found on the west coast of the island of Madagascar.
Good old YouTube, this is a rather weird video of a remote controlled sewer-cam, used to search for blockages and to inspect the overall condition of sewer.
Unfortunately there is no reference to size or scale, but I’m guessing the pipes aren’t that big – possible too small to walk or even crawl through?
So what is it? Most YouTube comments are suggesting it’s a form of bryozoan, a tiny colonial animal that generally builds a stony skeletons of calcium carbonate similar to coral.
But whatever these things are they don’t appear to have a hard structure! That’s when I discovered that some species of bryozoan can lack any calcification and instead have a mucilaginous or viscous like structure (source: Wikipedia).
Others have suggested it could be aestivating land snails waking up (seems unlikely as it’s generally wet in the servers) or even a type of fresh water jellyfish?
A History Channel/Monster Quest mashup that appears to debunk the whole Skyfish or Flying Rods phenomena.
Filing at night opens up all sorts of questions and I’m wondering if they should have also shot some high-speed footage in daylight to use as a comparison?
I’m not a huge fan of Monster Quest, it’s entertaining, but I find it tends to jump to conclusions to quickly for my liking – but it is entertaining – so I guess we will have to live with it?
How did piranhas — the legendary freshwater fish with the razor bite — get their telltale teeth? Researchers from Argentina, the United States and Venezuela have uncovered the jawbone of a striking transitional fossil that sheds light on this question. Named Megapiranha paranensis, this previously unknown fossil fish bridges the evolutionary gap between flesh-eating piranhas and their plant-eating cousins.
Present-day piranhas have a single row of triangular teeth, like the blade on a saw, explained the researchers. But their closest relatives — a group of fishes commonly known as pacus — have two rows of square teeth, presumably for crushing fruits and seeds. “In modern piranhas the teeth are arranged in a single file,” said Wasila Dahdul, a visiting scientist at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center in North Carolina. “But in the relatives of piranhas — which tend to be herbivorous fishes —the teeth are in two rows,” said Dahdul.
Megapiranha shows an intermediate pattern: it’s teeth are arranged in a zig-zag row. This suggests that the two rows in pacus were compressed to form a single row in piranhas. “It almost looks like the teeth are migrating from the second row into the first row,” said John Lundberg, curator at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia and a co-author of the study.
Fossilised teeth and upper jaw of Megapiranha paranensis shows intermediate tooth arrangement between single-rowed piranhas and their double-rowed relatives. The fossil measures about 3 inches in length.
If this is so, Megapiranha may be an intermediate step in the long process that produced the piranha’s distinctive bite. To find out where Megapiranha falls in the evolutionary tree for these fishes, Dahdul examined hundreds of specimens of modern piranhas and their relatives. “What’s cool about this group of fish is their teeth have really distinctive features. A single tooth can tell you a lot about what species it is and what other fishes they’re related to,” said Dahdul. Her phylogenetic analysis confirms their hunch — Megapiranha seems to fit between piranhas and pacus in the fish family tree.
The Megapiranha fossil was originally collected in a riverside cliff in northeastern Argentina in the early 1900s, but remained unstudied until paleontologist Alberto Cione of Argentina’s La Plata Museum rediscovered the startling specimen —an upper jaw with three unusually large and pointed teeth — in the 1980s in a museum drawer.
Cione’s find suggests that Megapiranha lived between 8-10 million years ago in a South American river system known as the Paraná. But you wouldn’t want to meet one today. If the jawbone of this fossil is any indication, Megapiranha was a big fish. By comparing the teeth and jaw to the same bones in present-day species, the researchers estimate that Megapiranha was up to 1 meter (3 feet) in length. That’s at least four times as long as modern piranhas. Although no one is sure what Megapiranha ate, it probably had a diverse diet, said Cione.
Other riddles remain, however. “Piranhas have six teeth, but Megapiranha had seven,” said Dahdul. “So what happened to the seventh tooth?”
“One of the teeth may have been lost,” said Lundberg. “Or two of the original seven may have fused together over evolutionary time. It’s an unanswered question. Maybe someday we’ll find out.”
A new dinosaur with nut-cracking jaws found in the Gobi desert ate like a bird—a parrot, to be exact.
The 3-foot-long (0.9-meter-long) Cretaceous creature had a boxlike skull and beaklike jaw that resemble those of modern parrots, which have beaks that can crack open nuts, a new study found.
The 110-million-year-old skull—as well as “a huge pile” of 50 stomach stones found with the fossil—suggests that the beast was chewing hard, fibrous nuts and seeds, the researchers say. Stomach stones are rocks ingested by some animals to grind food in their digestive systems.
The skull, found in the Gobi desert in Mongolia in 2001, once had giant jaw muscles attached to broad sheets of extremely rigid cheekbone, giving the animal a powerful bite.
Like a parrot, the dinosaur was able to move its jaws both vertically and horizontally, allowing it to “shear” tough plants.
If confirmed, Psittacosaurus gobiensis (“parrot dinosaur of the Gobi”) would be the world’s first known nut-eating dinosaur.
The skeleton of a whale that died around 10,000 years ago has been found in connection with the extension of the E6 motorway in Strömstad. The whale bones are now being examined by researchers at the University of Gothenburg who, among other things, want to ascertain whether the find is the mystical “Swedenborg whale”.
There are currently four species of right whale. What is particularly interesting is that the size and shape of the whale bones resemble those of a fifth species: the mystical “Swedenborg whale”, first described by the scientist Emmanuel Swedenborg in the 18th century.
“Bones from what is believed to be Swedenborg’s right whale have previously been found in western Sweden. However, determining the species of whale bones found in earth is complicated and there is no definitive conclusion on whether the whale actually existed, it could equally well be a myth,” says zoologist Thomas Dahlgren and his colleague Leif Jonsson.
Researchers have dubbed the monkey Mura’s saddleback tamarin (saguinus fuscicollis mura) named after the Mura Indians, the ethnic group of Amerindians of the Purus and Madeira river basins where the monkey occurs. Historically this tribe was spread through the largest territory of any of the Amazonian Indigenous peoples, extending from the Peruvian frontier today (Rio Yavari) east to the Rio Trombetas.
