New Species Found in Australia
I picked up a new news article:
Scientists said Sunday they had uncovered new marine animals in their search of previously unexplored Australian waters, along with a bizarre carnivorous sea squirt and ocean-dwelling spiders.
A joint US-Australian team spent a month in deep waters off the coast of the southern island of Tasmania to “search for life deeper than any previous voyage in Australian waters,” lead researcher Ron Thresher said.
What they found were not only species new to science — including previously undescribed soft corals — but fresh indications of global warming’s threat to the country’s unique marine life.
“Our sampling documented the deepest known Australian fauna, including a bizarre carnivorous sea squirt, sea spiders and giant sponges, and previously unknown marine communities dominated by gooseneck barnacles and millions of round, purple-spotted sea anemones,” Thresher said.
It’s pretty cool that we’re thousands of years old and we are still finding new animals on our planet. Just when you think the world is a small place, you realize there are places that we not only haven’t been… we can’t get there at all. On the one hand, I feel like it’s silly to spend billions of dollars exploring outer space when there is so much to learn here on earth, on the other hand I feel like it’s all science and it’s all good knowledge to have locked into the vault.