This is a time of ecological crisis and massive loss of animal diversity, make no mistake about it. But there’s still a vast amount of new stuff left to discover, and every year we see a significant influx of newly recognized species, even among tetrapods. In this and the next article, we take a whistle-stop tour of those tetrapod species new to science as of 2023. As ever, remember that new to science is not synonymous with new to humanity…
Caption: a recently-named-species montage, featuring a pangolin cladogram, the new gymnure Podogymnura intermedia Balete et al., 2023 and the Seepage siren. Images: Gu et al. (2023), Balete et al. (2023), Fedler et al. (2023).
A quick amphibian review. If, over the years, you’ve followed the Tetrapod Zoology articles on amphibians (oooor, if you’re well informed on amphibians in general) you’ll know that substantial numbers of new living amphibian species are named every year: over 100 each year, typically over 150. If you’re familiar with the idea that a handful of new bird and mammal species are named each year, that’s a lot. Non-specialists tend not to hear about these many species because they mostly don’t make the newswires.
Caption: a montage of just a few of the megophryid and strabomantid frogs named in 2023. Clockwise from upper left…. Xenophrys pangdaensis is a Tibetan megophryid; its authors suggested the common name Pangda horned toad (Shu et al. 2023); a montage showing the holotype female (a-c, e-f) and male (d) of the strabomantid Pristimantis kopinangae Means et al., 2023 from Mount Kopinang, Guyana; and the holotype specimen of Pristimantis clarae from Peru in (A) dorsal and (B) ventral views. Images: Shu et al. (2023), Means et al. (2023), Venegas et al. (2023).
At the time of writing, 106 new living amphibian species have been named in 2023. Most are frogs, and it’s obvious from the list that we’re in a very active phase of research on the study and naming of megophryid spadefoots from China, strabomantids from such nations as Ecuador, Guyana, Brazil and Peru, and Madagascan mantellids. Five new caecilians have been named so far in 2023, all Colombian and belonging to the genus Caecilia.
Caption: at least five new species of Caecilia caecilians were named in 2023. This is one of them: C. macrodonta Fernández-Roldán et al., 2023, a species noted for its large, recurved dentary teeth. It’s from the Cordillera Oriental of Colombia and the holotype was collected in 1980. Image: Fernández-Roldán et al. (2023).
Salamanders: new sirens and giants. About 14 new salamanders have been named so far during 2023, stand-outs for me including the Seepage siren Siren sphagnicola Fedler et al., 2023 from Florida and the Qimen giant salamander Andrias cheni Xu et al., 2023 of Anhui Province, China. The Seepage siren follows on the proverbial heels of the Reticulated or Leopard siren S. reticulata of Alabama, named in 2018, and is one of several taxa historically (but incorrectly) lumped together within S. intermedia, the Lesser siren (Fedler et al. 2023)
Caption: a male Seepage siren specimen, in this case an individual with a partly regenerated tail. This is the smallest living siren species, the longest specimen reported by Fedler et al. (2023) having a total length of about 19 cm. Image: Fedler et al. (2023).
We now move to mammals…
Two new gymnures. Gymnures or moonrats are poorly known east and south-east Asian lipotyphlans* that belong to Erinaceidae, the hedgehog family. They look superficially like giant, woolly-coated shrews. Of the five extant gymnure genera, I think it’s fair to say that the least familiar is the endemic Philippine genus Podogymnura. Podogymnura was named in 1905 for the Mindanao gymnure P. truei but the genus was regarded as monospecific until the 1982 naming of the Dinagat gymnure P. aureospinula. The Philippines are an area where both small mammal diversity is high, and where numerous recent discoveries have been made, so perhaps it was always likely that additional Podogymnura species would be discovered, perhaps on various of the islands around Mindanao. Dinagat and Bucas Grande are among those islands, and both are inhabited by P. aureospinula.
This year has seen the naming of a third species: the East Mindanao gymnure Podogymnura intermedia Balete et al., 2023. The specific name is a reference to the fact that it’s intermediate in size between P. auroespinula, the largest Podogymnura species, and the remaining members of the genus. Balete et al. (2023) also evaluated P. truei and found that the supposed subspecies P. truei minima Sanborn, 1953 differed sufficiently from the nominate form (in pelage and skin pigmentation, skull and tooth size and proportions and overall size) to warrant recognition as another species, so hello Podogymnura minima.
Caption: the holotype specimen of Podogymnura intermedia Balete et al., 2023, photographed in 2005 by D. S. Balete. The fact that the species was recorded in 2005 but not published until 2023 is another reminder of the fact that ‘publication date’ is very much not the same thing as ‘discovery date’. Image: Balete et al. (2023).
* Quit it with ‘Eulipotyphla’. You don’t need it. Lipotyphla still functions just fine, even though its composition has changed over recent decades. This is basically the same argument as the one Prothero et al. (2021) made about the similarly redundant ‘Cetartiodactyla’.
The mysterious pangolin. Pangolins are, I think, globally better known today than they were, but it’s sad that this is only the case because the extent of the absurd and disgusting trade in their meat and scales has reached epidemic proportions. A consequence of this overexploitation is that materials intercepted during shipment are now routinely examined via genetic and morphological analysis.
Pangolin scales obtained in Hong Kong in 2012 and 2013 possess genetic traits different from those of any recognised Asian pangolin species (Hu et al. 2016), this suggesting the presence of an otherwise unknown species. However, the extracted gene sequences were fragmentary and mitochondrial only, and the suggestion was made that their unusual nature could be explained by them representing variation within one of the known species, or being exclusively mitochondrial. The news for 2023 is that scales sharing genetic markers with the Hong Kong samples – confiscated from Yunnan, China in 2015 and 2019 – have now been analyzed. Gu et al. (2023) performed appropriately thorough comparisons between the DNA of this putative new species and 138 whole-genome sequences from other pangolins, and also examined the morphology too.
Caption: a Philippine pangolin mother and baby, a species almost certainly close, in both phylogeny and appearance, to the Asian cryptic species new for 2023. Image: Shukran888, CC BY-SA 3.0 (original here).
The conclusion: the scales do indeed belong to a new species, one presently known only from illegally transported scales. It’s been named the Asian mysterious pangolin Manis mysteria Gu et al., 2023 and it’s, hopefully, only a matter of time before the relevant molecular and scale characters are identified in individuals known from entire bodies, preferably live ones [UPDATE: technically, the name has been published without the allocation of a type specimen, meaning that M. mysteria is a nomen nudum]. M. mysteria scales are small, so this species will likely be a diminutive, climbing species similar to its close relatives. A time-calibrated molecular analysis shows that M. mysteria is part of the East Asian Manis clade and diverged from the Philippine M. culionensis and Sunda/Malayan M. javanica pangolins during the Pliocene, around 5 million years ago (Gu et al. 2023).
Caption: phylogenetic trees generated from examination and comparison of pangolin DNA, showing how the new cryptic species is part of the Asian Manis clade and is likely closest to the Malayan and Philippine pangolins. Image: Gu et al. (2023).
Other mammals, briefly. Other new mammals named during 2023 include the Argentinian tuco-tuco Ctenomys pulcer Verzi et al., 2023, two new talpid moles from Iran (Talpa hakkariensis Gündüz et al., 2023 and T. streetorum Gündüz et al., 2023, both previously included within Père David’s mole T. davidiana), and Príncipe’s pipistrelle Pseudoromicia principis Juste et al., 2023. UPDATE: yes, I forgot the Red tigrina Leopardus narinensis Ruiz-García et al., 2023, a cat from Colombia named for a skin collected in 1989 and initially misidentified as that of an Ocelot L. pardalis. That’s ironic given that I tweeted about its publication back when it was new!
Ok, we’ll stop there. Reptiles next…
Several previous Tetrapod Zoology articles discuss various of the animals mentioned here. See…
THE AMAZING WORLD OF SALAMANDERS, October 2013
The Biology of Sirens, June 2016
The Amazing Caecilians, October 2022
Refs - -
Balete, D. S., Heaney,L. R., Rickart, E. A., Quidlat, R. S., Rowsey, D. M. & Olson, L. E. 2023. A re-assessment of diversity among Philippine gymnures (Mammalia: Erinaceidae: Podogymnura), with a new species from eastern Mindanao. Zootaxa 5228, 244-266.
Fedler, M. T., Enge, K. M. & Moler, P. E. 2023. Unraveling Siren (Caudata: Sirenidae) systematics and description of a small, seepage specialist. Zootaxa 5258, 351-378.
Fernández-Roldán, J. D., Lynch, J. D. & Medina-Rangel, G. F. 2023. On the identities of Caecilia degenerata Dunn, 1942 and of C. corpulenta Taylor, 1968 (Amphibia: Gymnophiona: Caeciliidae) with descriptions of three new species of Caecilia Linnaeus, 1758 from the Cordillera Oriental of Colombia. Zootaxa 5227, 205-228.
Gu, T.-T., Wu, H., Yang, F. & Yu, L. 2023. Genomic analysis reveals a cryptic pangolin species. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 120, e2304096120.
Hu, J., Roos, C., Lv, X., Kuang, W. & Yu, L. 2020. Molecular genetics supports a potential fifth Asian pangolin species (Mammalia, Pholidota, Manis). Zoological Science 37, 538-543.
Prothero, D. R., Domning, D., Fordyce, R. E., Foss, S., Janis, C., Lucas, S., Marriott, K. L., Metais, G., Naish, D., Padian, K., Rössner, G., Solounias, N., Spaulding, M., Stucky, R. M., Theodor, J. & Uhen, M. 2021. On the unnecessary and misleading taxon “Cetartiodactyla”. Journal of Mammalian Evolution 29, 93-97.
