Old post but what is up with that story? They reclassify a spider and a bunch of articles went up about a newly discovered spider. That was discovered like 20 years ago.
I'm not sure about the details here (I haven't read the paper, yet), but this kind of thing isn't unusual in taxonomy, I speculate it went something like this:
Someone collected a sample speciement 25 years ago and it was either not examined or misidentified as another Atrax spp..
Then years later someone re-examins the sample (or maybe they found a new speciement in the wild and then compared it to existing samples) and realised and moved on to formally describe it.
4 Comments
Alice@hilariouschaos.com · 1 pts · 1y
speeder
synapse1278@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 1y
Big, black, deadly spider. That's a nope for me 🙅
mhague@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 1y
Old post but what is up with that story? They reclassify a spider and a bunch of articles went up about a newly discovered spider. That was discovered like 20 years ago.
tobogganablaze@lemmus.org · 1 pts · 1y
I'm not sure about the details here (I haven't read the paper, yet), but this kind of thing isn't unusual in taxonomy, I speculate it went something like this:
Someone collected a sample speciement 25 years ago and it was either not examined or misidentified as another Atrax spp..
Then years later someone re-examins the sample (or maybe they found a new speciement in the wild and then compared it to existing samples) and realised and moved on to formally describe it.
Full paper describing the new species is availible here.