A vegetarian piranha from the Amazon and a flying dinosaur found on the Isle of Skye are among the species previously unknown to science that have been named this year.
Natural History Museum (NHM) scientists and their partners across the world named almost 200 species in the last 12 months.
New finds include a snake from the Indian Himalayas named after actor and environmentalist Leonardo DiCaprio and the piranha named after Lord Of The Rings villain Sauron due to its orange and black markings that resemble “the eye”.
As they unveiled the list for 2024, NHM scientists highlighted the importance of naming and describing species to understand ecosystems and how they are affected by human-driven impacts.
Leading botanist Sandra Knapp told the PA news agency: “Every single specimen in our collection and every single named thing has a narrative and a story attached to it and having a name allows you to tell that story.”
Ms Knapp said the work is a “step in the chain” to establishing how nature is adapting to climate change and how biodiversity is under threat to better inform policy, conservation and science.
“We’re not going to cure cancer by naming a new fish from the Amazon but it does contribute to the conversation about how we manage our environment and how we go forward as a species amongst other species, because we’re a species too,” she said.
As the nascent deep sea mining industry develops, marine biologist Eva Stewart named and described two species of scavenging amphipods from the floor of the central Pacific Ocean.
“We’re still finding out more about these animals because there has historically not been that much sampling in the deep sea,” she said.
“With each year there’s more and more so we’re getting to learn more about these species.”
The work is part of wider efforts to establish what is living on the sea bed, which can then inform where marine protected areas should be put in place and how legislation might work to stymie biodiversity loss caused by mining.
The marine biologist said it was “really exciting” to name the species, adding that she called one after her grandmother.
Adrian Glover, who also works in the NHM deep sea lab, said that beyond applied science and solving modern society problems, “there’s still an element of wonder and discovery in what we do”.
“It’s about finding new, amazing things and describing them and connecting people to the nature around them,” he said.
This also comes into the work of NHM palaeontologist Paul Barrett, who helped to name a flying pterosaur from the middle Jurassic age after its fossilised bones were found in a rock on an Isle of Skye beach in 2006.
“We have relatively few middle Jurassic pterosaurs from anywhere in the world,” he said.
“So it helps fill in a little bit of a gap in our broader knowledge of where flying reptiles were at this time and the kinds of flying reptiles that were actually around.”
Mr Barrett said naming new dinosaur finds is similarly a small step in the chain of understanding the natural world and how ancient life responded to past climatic events.
Scientists also named two plant-eating dinosaurs this year – a sauropodomorph from Zimbabwe and a stegosaur from China, alongside new fossil spiders, a lizard-like reptile and a couple of mammals.
Looking at how past species responded to climatic events, Mr Barrett said: “Hopefully we can then use that as a kind of barometer for making more informed predictions about what might happen to similar animals that have either similar diets or similar physiologies into the future.”
