Ostra-blog 3 – How we discovered chupacabra
I’m having a lot of fun with these ostra-blogs, which I started on a whim to increase awareness of my study taxon, Ostracoda (here are links to the first two posts: 1, 2). There are so many ostracods and related stories I want to share, that I hardly know where to begin. I’ve also decided to restrict myself to one ostra-blog per week, so as not to interfere with my ever-so-important other activities, like reviewing papers and sitting in on meetings. Therefore, if there are roughly 30000 ostracod species (fossil plus living), I will finish telling you about all of them by about my 600th birthday, unless of course new species are described by then. In any event, I have reached a decision on this week’s ostra-blog. Since new species have been the subject of some recent blogs, and since I just saw chupacabra on the internet news, today, I will tell you the story of how my lab discovered and described the ostracod species Euphilomedes chupacabra. (Here is a link to the paper).
On new species
First of all, a word or two about new species: As relayed by The Other 95%, there is little academic reward for describing a species this day in age. Today, scientists are judged by their citation rate, and to a lesser but often still significant extent, by the number of grant dollars they pull in. True, in some cases describing a new species - for example by naming it after, say, Neil Young or Steven Colbert...
