
New order of animals discovered? - MaysonL
http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=man-discovers-new-life-form-at-sout-2011-04-26
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tokenadult
From the submitted blog post: "It was only recently that it was discovered
that mice sing to each other. It was not so very long ago that it was
discovered that clouds are filled with bacteria. What else remains to be
known? Nearly everything."

That's the take-away idea, that there are still unexpected discoveries to be
made all around us. The excitement with that idea seems to carry into the
author's writing in the blog post.

~~~
noahlt
David Baltimore won a Nobel Prize for discovering reverse transcriptase, the
enzyme that allows HIV to work. In a talk he gave at my high school, he
stressed the same message, saying that "the frontier of knowledge is nearer
than we expect".

Growing up, we learn everything throuugh books which seem to present all that
is knowable about a subject. It's hard to unlearn that perspective and
appreciate how much there is that humanity doesn't know.

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mikek
According to Wikipedia:

"Mantophasmatodea is a suborder of carnivorous African insects discovered in
2002, originally considered to be a new order, but since relegated to
subordinal status, and comprising the single family Mantophasmatidae."

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantophasmatidae>

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MrJagil
Am I just sensitive today, or was that a really poorly written article?

~~~
GiraffeNecktie
Actually I thought it was exceptionally well-written for a blog post since it
totally held my interest throughout. Don't confuse poor writing with good
writing that just needs a little love from an editor.

~~~
greencircle
That was the drama the author threw in. It was cheap.

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StuffMaster
OK, so what makes it so different? That's all I was looking for.

~~~
ohashi
Me too. And I wanted to know why it was different than a praying mantis
specifically.

~~~
jingchan
I agree, but the answer to your question is that it has no wings.

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Concours
well, nice article, it's funny to see this listed as a discovery, I'm african
and have seen this insect before and probably many others in my country, and I
am also sure many local folks know about this insects, too bad, they don't
know it's a great discovery for science.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
The discovery, as the article pointed out, was that this Was something un-
catalogued and in fact an entire new branch of life that was not recognized.
Not that the bug was unknown, but unrecognized for what it was.

Having seen it and not recognized it as a new order of life, is the tragedy.
Because, honestly, we are almost all ignorant of biology beyond human biology.

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tuacker
OT: I usually dislike if something pops up when I hover over a word. The
implementation on this site is different though. Select a word and hover
"learn more" for a while, or click it. I still don't know how I feel about
that but the ease of use to get to a Wikipedia article, images or videos is
nice.

~~~
justincormack
Things you never notice if you read on an ipad...

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yaix
Isn't there a "scientific Google Goggles version"?

Wouldn't it be as easy as photograph all archived specimens and let Google's
photo search filter out duplicates of known animals. What remains needs
names...

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bugsy
Interesting article. It's strange that over the last 100,000 years no one in
Namibia or other parts of Africa had discovered any of these insects.

Or had they.

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mkramlich
This reminds me of something I noticed about economics and the Nobel Prize.
Every other year or so, when the Nobel for economics is awarded, very often I
notice it's awarded for something that I already knew or considered obvious,
or figured out independently. Yes, yes, I know the differentiator is that the
person in question wrote academic papers about it, had influence within the
field with formal citations, and often "proved" it (or explained it, formally,
as much as one can in a soft science like economics), but it wasn't a
fundamentally world-shaking or new breakthrough. Unlike say most of the
physics prizes. When I first heard about the theory of relativity I wasn't
like, "Duh, obvious!", or quantum mechanics, etc. But that has happened a lot
with economics.

Anyway this article made me think of it, because it started from the position
that someone had discovered something totally new and unknown to mankind, only
later to reveal that actually lots of people knew about it, they just didn't
have an official academic name & categorization for it, formally, within the
academic field in question. But it wasn't truly new. And strains the common
meaning of what should be a powerful term: breakthrough.

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reubenyeah
Fokken' Prawns.

~~~
Twisol
Was that a reference to the movie, "District 9"? I don't see much resemblance
beyond the "unknown insectoid life" theme...

~~~
StavrosK
You know how it is, if South Africa is mentioned, someone brings it up.

