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hello and welcome to technically speaking where scientists and Engineers come together to trans to common interest share knowledge and satisfy some curiosity I'm Laura and I'm joined by Ellie to talk about discovering new species of animals and refining ones we thought were extinct so Ellie you report on this as a science writer so tell me about it yes so I am very lucky because I get given quite a lot of these new species X has found a new species in y and it's an insect or it's a lizard or
even a mammal sometimes gets uh found to be a new species and I love it and I get very cute press releases with lots of nice pictures of the animals in from different parts of the world and I think it's really fun because I think a lot of people don't think or don't realize that we are still discovering new species every year and I think that's really cool more animals who could argue with that well depends what the animal does I suppose and you want only the useful ones I
guess they're all useful in some way but I'm thinking back to the episode we were doing about invasive species and British Farmers seemed Keen to eradicate rabbits from the UK because we eradicated all the top predators because they were dangerous and scary so the rabbits were proliferating in destroying crops and they were seen as a bad thing but that kind of suggests you're going to have to eliminate all animals it's the wrong thing we're going the wrong way with
that yeah very very much the absolute opposite of what we're do today exactly so tell me about you're saying these are like really cute and exciting things tell me about the cutest most exciting thing you found recently you found personally oh I'd love to find something that would be good wouldn't it if I went out but they do say apparently you're most likely to discover um new species in your back Garden which is I think where insects comes in because there's loads of insects like way more
than mammals way more than fish way more than literally everything else uh and we're still discovering more there's still more out there I think perhaps it's because people I say this with all due respect to the entomology Community don't care about insects as much as they care about the cute and fluffy especially the the general public um so perhaps the money isn't in entomology and finding new species of insect as it could be but they have found the very exciting New
Beetle that has genitals shaped like a bottle opener so I thought you'd enjoy that one okay that doesn't sound like a thing the public would immediately go Oh isn't that nice and cute and interesting it's weird it's quite cute I mean as Beatles go it's like kind of black and green it's shiny and yeah it's its back end looks like well his genitals look like a bottle opener and I think it's fun because uh carlburg the beer company somehow got involved with this and they
like funded the research and so they've named the new Beetle uh lovous ksbg eye which I just think great let's get everyone involved let's find more species more beetles and if you want to name them after beer companies you know there are worse things to name them after oh yes I'm not sure how I feel about a scientific discovery being named after a commercial entity though I know happens quite a lot it's kind of what some science is but it just makes me feel a little bit dirty I got
into science for the discovery not for the commercial side yeah but you still need the funding right if carlsburg are going to bankroll you know your research you're not going to be like oh no sorry I can't can't do it I mean at least it's csbg not someone like especially dodgy like some companies you'd think oh I don't want to be associated with them but I think this is nice it does make me wonder though about how often new species are found do you have any stats around that so I'm
waiting for the Natural History Museum to publish how many species they found this year but that'll probably be a little bit longer a wait but last year just the Natural History Museum like Affiliated scientists found 351 new species which is almost one a day which I think is pretty good going that was in 2022 and that's only the researchers and scientists from the Natural History Museum so potentially way more found so given what you said about finding new species in your garden
I can just imagine like crawling around looking at different Beatles and comparing them cuz I remember doing some of this in my paleontology modules in my undergrad for amonites and you have to stare at a lot of ammonites I mean it's hard that's the other thing like you don't know what you don't know so all you don't possibly know every single species of beetle that has been described let alone if you found a new one so it is quite a complicated process and I think we don't maybe give enough
credit to them like finding out that they are actually new like if no one knows then you head your bets and think yeah I'm going to name this species after carlburg or do you think oh actually it's a bit too similar to that other one that guy found three years ago well this is what I wonder cuz when I was staring at these ammonites These are fossilized sea creatures with the swirly shell yeah basically squid yeah and the best way to identify them was on they're
called sutures the tiny little lines on the outside of their shell that did not wear a new chamber inside the shell starts and they all have different patterns and honestly to me there were some broad differences but a lot of them just looked pretty much identical so I felt like there must be some statistical way of figuring it out from just looking at them I'm not sure so much about that sort of thing but I guess you probably could still take DNA from the shells but
a lot of it is DNA based so they will be looking at the gene sequences the codes and also the morphology right so experts will know that this looks like this if you see what I mean so species X has three White Stripes but species y has seven white stripes and what you do when you find a new species is that you have to do um like a species description like when you publish the paper and they have like basically like when you go to crafts and they're all like oh this
Dalmation is the perfect breed standard of this species like breed of dog they'll find like the perfect one of this new species or potentially even the only one and that will be against what all other species are compared to which I think is quite interesting they call it I think they call it the holotype oh testing me now I do get the impression so I spend a lot of time watching the birds in our B garden and you do learn to sort of spot oh that that's a j that
just flew over because you spent a lot of time watching the birds and you just know that's ex and you can't really explain why that's what I think like if someone's like oh what bird is that I'm like oh it's a robin well how do you know I was like well how how do you not know like and because someone has told me before that it's a robin and someone else would have been like oh yeah a robin and you know that Robins are small and brown and they have a red chest and
they're likely to be found in your garden so you sort of and then you build it up and you know that a black bird isn't a robin because it looks totally different but even a dunck isn't a robin because it's slightly different and then yeah and then the more you learn the more more you can t them apart but then going back to what you're saying out DNA I vaguely remember this from my undergrad degree so I did a little bit of research it's been a very long long time since I studied paleontology I do
remember them saying something about the molecular clock so DNA mutations occur at a more or less constant rate and a lot of them don't have much of an effect on the morphology or what the animal looks like yeah the plant but then some of them seem to have some widespread changes like the mutation suddenly speeds up because it's beneficial yeah I can see that happening oh and then you can date it sort of based on where you see those changes in the genes I think
so I think there's more yeah um so there an article in Scientific American about 10 years ago about what makes us different is what it was called and it was I think from the point of view of biostatistician they wrote some code to find which sections of human DNA had changed the most compared to chimpanzees and it was this big calculation for doing something 10 years ago on a Computing cluster and it did identify like a list of which areas of the genome would change the most between two
species and they could use that as a starting point to see what effect those Gene Expressions had and whether they yeah whe they actually made a difference to the animal's characteristics or not but don't they say we've got so much similar DNA between humans and apes right so if we have so much the same then there must be clear differences that affect how you look otherwise we'd all be covered in black fur some still off yeah that's what got me thinking think about if much of our DNA is s
similar and aren't we like is it 80% similar to a cabbage yeah something like that isn't it like a ridiculous amount then there must be more subtlety to it than just the amount of DNA that's different yeah it does seem to be certain regions that seem to code for interesting stuff yeah I think that's probably true what surprised me the most about the article was that a lot of what's was referred to as junk DNA something like over 98% of our DNA it's not actually junk it does do stuff we
just don't really know what in a lot of cases oh I like that idea of being like well you've got it it must do something we just haven't figured out what that is yet yeah so it sounds quite complicated to actually try and figure out for certain yeah has this section of DNA led to a meaningful change that would actually introduce a new species I suppose also the new species thing quite a lot of them are found in remate remote places now so like people haven't been
able to access them or no one wants to spend four weeks trekking through some remote jungle looking for new species on the off CH so it's hard to know what you're looking for if no one's ever found it but equally if you've got a good record of the fact that seven species live on this island of lizard let's say and then you find one and it doesn't fit the you know profile of any of the other seven then either it's a new species or it's a hybrid or it's a species that's you know come across on
your boat and you didn't realize and it's got off in the wrong place you know that's how you get introduced species sometimes so I think it is quite interesting I was going to say I feel like finding a new species of living animals probably a bit easier because you can see it in action but now I'm thinking maybe not because you have to go and see it to begin with yeah you still have to find it first yeah whereas going to a local Museum or whatever and say can I sample
that DNA compare it to this DNA and do some analysis A lot of them come out of museums cuz people will be like oh we had that thing in a drawer for 200 years and no one bothered with it and then we got a new dire and they were doing a sort out and they found it and they were like wait hang on that's not what it's labeled as so yeah loads of stuff comes out of museums being like this is not what we had it labeled as or this was wrong or now we've got the money to uh
do some DNA testing on it and have a look see what it is yeah I'd read a lot of finding new species actually more reclassifying things we already had that we thought were the same and are dead or extinct but I me you could still find new species of extinct stuff like there's that huge I think it's a pilosa I'm saying that right because I get lynched if not um that they just took out of the cliffs in the Jurassic Coast down in Dorset and it's enormous and it's got like they've just got the head
which is easily like almost 2 m long and it's so it's I mean the photos of it incredible its teeth are like it look it's a proper sea monster so yeah they found and they think that's a new species because it's got a Crest like over the top of its skull bone which none of the other ones that they know about that they've found have so yeah really cool I think we've done this a little bit in a previous episode figuring out how do they know what's going on in the fossil record cuz a lot
of it is not very well preserved so finding that one species is probably quite a rare thing there might have been millions of those on the planet at one point well the Jurassic Coast is obviously famous for dinosaurs and fossils because of like the rock formation in that area and they're like trying to aim to find one of everything that was alive at that time but obviously that's not always possible yeah but we talk about new species and you mentioned the one that is strangely
linked to a particular beer because of a particular characteristic yes talking about Beetle genitals straight off the bat yeah are there any other funky maybe um slightly less risky ones that are interesting um there's some that get named after celebrities which I think is really fun so there's um I think it's a snake named after Harrison for he's like a bit sad about this because apparently he's like obviously a really nice person and he's got grandchildren all that um
and he's like uh scientists keep naming Critters after me but it's always the scary ones I don't understand I spend my free time cross stitching and I sing Labis to my Basel plants so they've named a snake in Peru Tako menades Harrison fory but he is vice chair of conservation International so maybe it's not such a surprise it's a really cool looking snake as well oh okay cuz there was one of the indana Jones films it was he didn't like it was snakes he didn't
like wasn't it oh is it is that a thing about Indiana Jones he doesn't like snake he's always in a snake pit though isn't he like getting out of trouble yeah I think that might be why he doesn't like snakes cuz he had that Adventure when he was a child I'm completely misremembering a lot of um the Indiana Jones films now I'm sure there's at least one movie where he ends up in a snake pit there yeah but I wonder if that's the link and someone just thought I really like that
scene I like Harrison Ford let us name it after him but they didn't call it Indiana Jones I they called it Harris but maybe they're not allowed because it's like owned by the movie studio or something maybe I think I'd quite like to have a species of something named after me what do you think mammal fish bird beetle I really can't decide I mean you know I used to have pet rats and I do really like them they're very cute a that would be cute but I don't know what
a new species of rat would be like necessarily yeah you could do I'm sure you could do small shrew like mammal there'll be some rodent type thing just discovered I have no doubt we can name it after you David atra has got loads loads of rodents named after him or just rodents or loads of species in general which I think is nice you've got to wonder what scientists will be saying in like 100 or 200 years time when they're reassessing what scientists today have
done to find in classify new species and looked at the names and went huh huh really why but they did that recently I'm sure they did they renamed some because oh what happened it was oh yeah dozens of birds in the US because they were named after like people that weren't very nice or people that were like slave owners and stuff because a lot of the people that found the birds in the first place were wealthy people of a time um so they decided that they would rename them because of their past
that makes sense which I think is is better yeah so I guess we could have eventually all the Harrison For Eyes could be renamed or something else yeah well I mean let's hope Harrison Ford doesn't do anything morally reprehensible thinking more than lines of future scientists saying this is just silly these names are weird and confusing can we just standardize them well I think usually it's not the whole name so it will belong to it will still indicate that it belongs to a certain
Class A Certain genus but then yeah you can have a bit of fun and throw in fory at the end or David atam buy or something like that well something to look forward to see if that's a trend that continues but I feel like we should go back to dead animals now having talked about discoveries and celebrities um mainly cuz dinosaurs are cool dinosaurs are so cool so what can you tell me about discovery of more dinosaurs you mentions um the one that was found on the Jurassic Coast recently
are there more oh there were loads more Yani Smith ey was discovered in Utah and he is approximately 99 million years old uh he lived during the mid Cretaceous Period and they managed to find his skull his spine some teeth and a little bit of his limb uh yeah and that's the first discovery of that particular dinosaur species oh is he a new species or is he just a newly think he's a new species I'm not sure now see I am starting to wonder if if it is the only one they found How can
there be certain it is definitely a new species and not just a slight mutation of a previously known species well that's the thing that's what's hard about it that's where the the dni the dni the DNA comes in to help you look and obviously like similar species that you found before because lots of these places where they're found especially dinosaurs are like known fossil areas is like the same as the Jurassic Coast so they will have other skulls from other species that they can compare them to
but then a lot of it comes down to like oh the left tooth was 3 cm longer in this one than the left tooth of that one so then it's longer and you think really really is that is that how it works but it is more comp ated than that I'm sure but yeah morphological differences differences in how it looks and then DNA and yeah I guess time period as well you can date these fossils quite accurately and see if it was likely that that sort of species was living at that time based
on the size of its teeth or the way it moved or how big its legs were yeah and I guess there has to be some consensus in the scientific Community CU if they find new species they publish it in a journal and that goes through a peer revieww process right so it's not just one scientist saying that oh no absolutely not yeah would definitely I mean also there hardly ever one person that discovers it right like these papers have multiple names on this skull will get well not passed around but
looked at by multiple people often they take X-rays or CT scans of the fossils as well which is always cool to see and then you can really see like differences in this eye socket is much wider or much narrower or the snout is much longer or shorter or thicker so yeah you can tell then you can look at it much clearly more clearly there was one discovered I'm trying to find it now that had a fun hand like a dinosaur hand and they've never seen like that kind of hand
morphology before yeah new species of therapod dinosaur discovered in in a Mongolia and it's of particular s importance complete hand some ribs and part of a limb 121 million years old so a little bit older than the other one and they they've got really detailed images of this one claw you know in Jurassic Park where they have that scene where the like the claw comes down this is like that one claw and it I mean it looks incredible and it's all labeled and that's all it took to figure out if
it was a new species just really detailed analysis of this one claw I expect probably more than that but that's what they stressed in the press release that I read was that it was all about this unusual plaw like structure I'll share the picture with you afterwards but they have labeled every inch of this probably like 10 cm long claw so they really they have gone ful in fully in detail it's called Ming mangion leang which is a mouth yeah is that named after someone that helped
Discover it maybe or am I reading far too much into that I thought it was going to be named after where they found it cuz often that is quite common but it hasn't said they didn't say why they named it that they just just felt like it there's probably a reason I just don't know where it is I think they or this a this is an initial classification and is tentative and they plan to keep looking for more fossils so they can find where this new species fits into
dinosaur taxonomy so they AR they aren't 100% sure oh okay it's interesting that they put it out there if they're not necessarily 100% sure but I think that actually makes a lot of sense because I guess you're only sure is your data and the analysis that you can do and if you as you say if you're not got that completely f record can you really ever be sure can you really ever be sure I guess not yeah until you find you might never find another spies like that again
like or another claw or another tailbone so yeah you can only work with the information you've got and the fossils you can see and look at and I you instances of things being classified incorrectly aren't there oh yeah loads there was one recently that was like oh we thought it was a plant but it turned out it was a turtle just a little bit different but if all you're looking at is the fossilize and rains I can see how that would happen I can see that a leaf skeleton would
look a lot like an animal skeleton yeah I mean when you look at it it just looks like a gray rock with some like indents in and easily those indents could be like Leaf Parts but no it turns out that it is actually turtle shell which is cute but yeah it does just look like a great Pebble in all honesty I'm sorry everyone you could pick it up and not even know it could be in your back Garden you could have held it in your hand it could it could be in your back
Garden yeah that's exactly the point it could have been there however many millions of years old for that time and you just toss it aside and you'd never know I feel like this is turning into a conversation of what's easier discovering extinct species from The Rock record or discovering existing species that are running around the planet now I still vote living species I think because I think at least then you've got all of history to look back on right so I feel like maybe that's
easier yeah and maybe things like behaviors to take into account there was I heard about a golden mold that's recently been rediscovered so we thought it was extinct I guess yeah I love the story because a golden mole like absolutely adorable how could you resist so this is really interesting this is the re wild which is a conservation charity the search for lost species project and basically these species are all on this list of lost species because they haven't been seen in however many
years so this gorgeous golden mole which is properly golden it's so cute hasn't been seen since 1936 and they basically have all these species on this list and they've set out to try and find them to see if they have gone extinct are they still there what's going on so they sent their team out to South Africa to find this golden mle and it swims through the sand wow it's adorable uh but this is interesting how they found it to detect them all they used e DNA so you might know that people
obviously shed skin cells as they move about so so the same is true for animals they shed skin cells hair bodily fluids and so they tried to find these like pieces of Edna within the sand okay so they're they're looking for mole dust oh yes golden mold and but it's absolutely incredible because they found it they found this uh it's called D winton's golden mole and they said extracting DNA from the soil is not without its challenges but we've been honing our skills and refining our
techniques and we were fairly confident that if D winton's golden mall was in the environment we would be able to find it and sequence its DNA which is exactly what they've done a 100 soil samples later only a 100 well apparently they must have had some way of refining that down to get to the DNA analysis cuz I was imagining they just do like loads of it's effectively PCR reactions I've brought the thoughts there yeah cuz I I can't imagine see he get an entire genome is all that
straightforward no it must be quite well they've also found three other species within the same well not the same samples but within the samples so there's the cape golden Mall Grant's golden Mall van zil's golden mall and then also the long lost D winton's golden mall so the golden malls are thriving well that's good to know because you keep hearing about biodiversity loss now that's a bad thing because it makes nature less resilient to change yes so that's quite a good
news story to know that some species are actually doing pretty well I think it's nice like it's still out there and it has been out there clearly breeding clearly surviving for the last what 1936 so 90 years odd something like that 80 something years yeah just hiding away from all these people that might do terrible things to it so cute they found more as well this is what I think is so extraordinary about this project they found you know I was talking about how
people um celebrities have animals named after them m so uh David atra atra's long beak to kidna same sort of situation hasn't been seen in 60 years um they sent out a team now this really does sound terrific because it's out somewhere in the Cyclops mountains of Indonesia which is incredibly remote and again there's only one single Museum specimen that was found in 1961 no one had ever taken a photograph of it it was just known from this uh one specimen and they were in the forest for
four weeks someone broke their arm in two places someone got M uh malaria and someone else ended up with a leech inside their eye oh but they found it they found atra long beat to kidna just waddling about in the forest as you do I think someone's going to make a film about this it's got all the elements there it so has right you got to think they got to send you know um BBC Natural History unit out on one of these Expeditions and get this you know ReDiscover these lost species it writes
itself turn it into some sort of exciting action adventure drama you think we spent four weeks trekking but it's like it's like a David Aur show because they said they put all these camera traps up in this area where they thought it was and didn't find anything and then the last memory card of the last camera the last pictures then they found it it's such it's such a story that is yeah you can't write that I mean all I know about the idna is sadly enough from Sonic the Hedgehog
quite embarrassed to say that I'm pretty sure it's I expected more from you I'm pretty sure what they found wasn't a pink slightly spiky thing with giant Knuckles wandering around or zooming around uh I give you slightly spiky it wasn't it's not pink it's sort of black I guess it's a black and white picture they've got of it so it's like yeah gray black it is like it does have quite big hands I don't know if it's quite Knuckles off Sonic the Hedgehog level but they've got
cuz they dig and they make Burrows so they do have like fairly big shov hands or feet feet feet hands feet I don't know I pretty sure I say the dog as well that he's got hands my rats definitely had hands in my head anyway oh yeah your rats would have had hands cuz they like hold food front of their faces didn't they exactly stick them in your ear occasionally cuz Groot was just really weird what so our rats were called Rocket in Groot and Groot just quite
like to do things like stick her nose in your ear and give it a Sniff and then stick a porw in there just have a look just see if you got any snacks hiding up in there pounce on your lips cuz that's not at all painful the problem is now right so the cat has got into this habit if I've been eating something and she hasn't been involved she'll come and sit right in front of my face and sniff my mouth to be like why would you eating crackers and not sharing why were you
eating cheese and not paying the cheese tax like she'll know she'll look at me and be like oh you were eating popcorn I don't like popcorn that's fine but if I've been eating something that she likes she's she's cross oh I have to share all my food do you have a habit of feeding her when you're eating I very much try not to except at breakfast she does have a little bit of toast cuz she likes oh there you go then we have a hard fast rule with our dog he does not
get anything but his own food when we're eating and we do not interact with him until we finish do you think that is very disciplined and I applaud you for that I'm too much of a soft touch clearly I'm trying to make life easier for myself I don't want a dog p no it is it is much better it's a much better Habit to be in especially with a dog as well that you would take to like social situations yeah you know like in the pub and stuff you don't want them like bothering other people exactly he's
already pretty good at doing that without any more encouragement I am really tempted to take Sparks in the pub one day I think like I think she'd really enjoy it she's quite social you put her on a lead or just hover her in a B oh I think I put her on a lead but she really doesn't like dogs so that's why we haven't taken her because I think Sparks in the pub on a lead with the dogs she she'd panic but if she was on the lead in the pub by herself just with other people she'd be
absolutely fine especially if they were feeding her crackers anyway I feel like we stopped talking about um discovering new species and just talking about species that exist in our houses the new species in your back Garden we've come full circle it's fair we've gone a lot of way around the world with this actually we have we've been everywhere we've been Jurassic Coast we've been Utah we've been Indonesian Islands yeah we've talked about finding new species in the fossil record species
that are still living a few more dinosaurs which are always cool and we talked about rediscovering species we thought were lost so pretty comprehensive you think so yeah so on that note I guess I will say this is our final episode of the Year oh my goodness me we're breaking for Christmas soon which will be something to look forward to happy holidays everybody listening hope you're having a lovely Christmas time yes and Christmas is of course the time for giving and we do have our
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got any suggest suggestions of things we should make podcasts on please let us know find us on social media and I guess we'll see you in 2024 yeah and I think I would also say if you can't afford to give us any money it would be really helpful if you would tell a friend or tell a colleague about this amazing podcast you've listen to and give the gift of the podcast to someone else which also helps us out because it means more people listen a see the perfect gift you never knew you needed a new
podcast listen to so yeah give well this Christmas and as Ellie says we will see you with some brand new exciting episodes in 2024 the views expressed in this podcast belong entirely to the person that said them did not represent any industry or organization if you enjoyed listening to these views it would really help us out if you could rate US leave a review and tell a friend this podcast was sponsored by no one but if you're interested in funding us to continue to have Frank
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