Reuters: Creature from a dark fishin’ hole, a giant unknown to science..
It crawled from under a rock, Reuters‘s Maggie Fox reports, and right onto the list of new taxonomy. A giant crawdaddy, er, crayfish in non-faux-rubespeak, is giant by standards of its genus, if not by those of its better known crustacean examples of parallel evolution, lobsters. But five inches is a big crayfish. It’s twice as long (and about eight times the weight) of the creek’s standard, known varieties.
She writes it pretty short, but not too short to mention that for all the environmental degradation we read and worry about, science continues to discover species we haven’t even seen before. And in this case, it’s not in some remote and barely populated part of the globe but right here on a creek in Tennessee. The news is formally in the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington.
Grist for the Mill: U. of Illinois Press Release with a link to more, very cool pictures. Journal abstract ;
- Charlie Petit
