US researchers have identified 14 new species of shrews on an Indonesian island where only seven of that genus were previously known.
There were so many, and some look so much alike that after a while Louisiana State University biologist Jake Esselstyn and his colleagues began looking for Latin words that mean “ordinary.”
“Otherwise, I don’t know what we would call them,” said Esselstyn, who also named the seventh known species of pointy-nosed insect-eating mammals on the island of Sulawesi.
This is why shrews whose species names mean things like “hairy tail” and “long” have been joined by “Crocidura mediocris,” “C. normalis “,” C. ordinary “and” C. alone”
The 101-page document will be “invaluable to all current and future students of mammalian biodiversity,” said Nathan S. Upham, research assistant professor in the Arizona State University College of Life Sciences and lead creator. the online database on mammalian diversity Mammal Diversity Database.
Upham was not involved in the study, which was published Dec. 15 in the Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History and also involved researchers from the Indonesian Institute of Sciences, the Victoria Museums in Australia and the University of California.
It’s been 90 years since many new species were identified in a single article, Esselstyn said. A 1931 article by George Henry Hamilton Tate identified 26 possible new species of South American marsupials, but it was later discovered that 12 were not separate species for a total of 14 new ones.
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