A toothy toadstool. A vegetarian piranha with a distinctive mark. And a pygmy pipehorse floating in the Indian Ocean shallows.
These wild wonders were among the hundreds of previously unknown species of animals, plants and fungi that scientists named and described for the first time in 2024, expanding our surprisingly limited knowledge of Earth’s diversity.
“Scientists estimate that we’ve identified only one-tenth of all species on Earth,” said Dr. Shannon Bennett, chief of science at the California Academy of Sciences, in a statement.
“While it is critical to place protections on known threatened species, we must also allocate resources towards identifying unknown species that may be just as important to the functioning of an ecosystem,” Bennett said.
Researchers connected to the institution described 138 new species in 2024, including 32 fish. One standout was a pygmy pipehorse named Cylix nkosi. The seahorse relative was originally found in 2021 in the cool temperate waters surrounding the North Island of New Zealand, but the species described this year was discovered in the subtropical waters off South Africa, expanding the known range of this group to the Indian Ocean
“South African reefs present notoriously difficult diving conditions with rough weather and intense, choppy waves — we knew we only had one dive to find it,” underwater photographer and marine biologist Richard Smith said in a statement.
“This species is also quite cryptic, about the size of a golf tee, but luckily we spotted a female camouflaged against some sponges about a mile offshore on the sandy ocean floor.”
The researchers involved in describing the new species chose nkosi as its name. A reference to the local Zulu word for “chief,” the name reflects the species’ crown-like head shape and acknowledges South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province where it was found.
Moth species among new discoveries
The Natural History Museum in London said its researchers had been involved in 190 new discoveries of living and fossilized animals, including 11 new species of moth, eight crabs, four rats and four snakes.
One of the moth species from a genus called Hemiceratoides from Madagascar feeds itself by drinking the tears of sleeping birds, while another newly identified species of moth, Carmenta brachyclado, was found fluttering against a window in a Welsh living room despite its origins in Guyana.
The moth got stuck in a boot belonging to a photographer, who unwittingly brought the insect from South America to her home in Wales, where it emerged. Her daughter, ecologist Daisy Cadet, recognized the creature as something unusual and contacted the Natural History Museum in London.
Another striking find was a vegetarian piranha called Myloplus sauron from Brazil’s Xingu River, said Rupert Collins, a senior curator of fishes at the museum, who helped describe the fish. It was named sauron due to its resemblance to the Eye of Sauron from J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings.”
“The reason we named it this was really a no-brainer because this fish is disc-shaped and has a thin vertical bar across the body, which looks just like an eye,” Collins said in a video shared by the museum.
In addition, in 2024 scientists have documented a mystery mollusk in the deep ocean, a ghost shark, a blob-headed fish, and a type of semi-aquatic mouse.
A ‘race against time’
Among the fascinating finds from scientists at the UK’s Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew was an intriguing new species of fungi in wooded heathland near the town of Royal Tunbridge Wells, England. Phellodon castaneoleucus sports teeth-like structures instead of the gills usually seen beneath mushroom caps.
Botanists also discovered five new orchid species from sites across the Indonesian archipelago, a gray-stemmed ghost palm from western Borneo with leaves with white undersides, and an enigmatic family of plants known as Afrothismia that are confined to continental African forests without the ability to photosynthesize.
Scientists linked to Kew described 149 new species of plant and 23 species of fungi. The institute said that its annual list of new species is a reminder of the many unknowns waiting to be discovered. No doubt 2025 will bring a fresh list of newly discovered creatures, plants and fungi.
“The sheer privilege of describing a species as new to science is a thrill that not many will ever get to experience,” said Martin Cheek, a senior research leader in the Africa team at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
“Sadly, this delight is increasingly being overshadowed by the many threats that plants face as a direct consequence of human activity,” he said.
“The devastating reality is that more often than not, new species are being found on the brink of extinction and it’s a race against time to find and describe them all.”
