Over 1,000 Species Discovered On A Single Area
Monday, December 15, 2008
BANGKOK (AFP) – Scientists have discovered more than 1,000 species in Southeast Asia's Greater Mekong region in the past decade, including a spider as big as a dinner plate, the World Wildlife Fund said Monday.
A rat thought to have become extinct 11 million years ago and a cyanide-laced, shocking pink millipede were among creatures found in what the group called a "biological treasure trove".
The species were all found in the rainforests and wetlands along the Mekong River, which flows through Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam and the southern Chinese province of Yunnan.
"It doesn't get any better than this," Stuart Chapman, director of WWF's Greater Mekong Programme, was quoted as saying in a statement by the group.
"We thought discoveries of this scale were confined to the history books."
The WWF report, "First Contact in the Greater Mekong", said that "between 1997 and 2007, at least 1,068 have been officially described by science as being newly discovered species."
These included the world's largest huntsman spider, with a leg span of 30 centimetres (11.8 inches), and the "startlingly" coloured "dragon millipede", which produces the deadly compound cyanide.
Not all species were found hiding in remote jungles -- the Laotian rock rat, which the study said was thought to be extinct about 11 million years ago, was first encountered by scientists in a local food market in 2005, it said.
Continue Reading...
Feel free to share it!
4 comments:
-
whew! i guess i have found and hold one like this..am not really sure if that was like this..that was during our field experiments with snakes..hehehe!
anyway, hope u did the tag that i shared.. -
it's great that there are new/rare species discovered in these modern times, friend.
usually animals bear the brunt in today's fast and vast land development that goes with modernize commercialization. -
I think I've read this somewhere. It is very interesting to know that we can still find these "supposed" extinct animals in our Asian lands. It just shows that we haven't developed too much. There are still life in the deeper places of our jungles. I also hope though that modern nation will not disturb their habitat too much as to make them really extinct. We should save these species for our future generations as well.
Anyways, I actually have a tag for you at my blog. I'm not sure if you'd take it though hope you would. Come grab it here:
http://chazlizone.blogspot.com/2008/12/cute-fun-google-tag.html
have a nice day! -
Hi Ading, kala ko dami kong na miss na post, hmmm , I thought it would be tons of backlogs heheh kunti lang pala :)
