• mhague@lemmy.world
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    16 days ago

    Old post but what is up with that story? They reclassify a spider and a bunch of articles went up about a newly discovered spider. That was discovered like 20 years ago.

    • tobogganablazeOPM
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      15 days ago

      I’m not sure about the details here (I haven’t read the paper, yet), but this kind of thing isn’t unusual in taxonomy, I speculate it went something like this:

      Someone collected a sample speciement 25 years ago and it was either not examined or misidentified as another Atrax spp..

      Then years later someone re-examins the sample (or maybe they found a new speciement in the wild and then compared it to existing samples) and realised and moved on to formally describe it.

      Full paper describing the new species is availible here.