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Asked by saida123456 to Claire, Joanna, Kapila, Renata, Suzanne on 19 Jun 2013.
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Joanna Bryson answered on 19 Jun 2013:
yes, we keep finding new animals all the time. Even new monkeys are being discovered! http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/running-ponies/2012/09/15/new-species-of-african-monkey-discovered/ This is one of the many reasons it is important to save as much wilderness as we can, there are so many things still to learn from our planet. Also, evolution never stops, so there will always be new sorts of creatures to discover.
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Renata Medeiros answered on 19 Jun 2013:
Yes, there are! Particularly amongst the insects we know that we only described a very small percentage of them. In a tropical forest every single tree might have it’s own specific group of insects and it is a huge task to find them all. There are also many unfound creatures like bacteria, microscopic animals or deep sea species, for instance. Finding new animals is much rarer when it comes to big animals but we are also still finding small mammals and bird species. It also makes things complicated the fact that animals are constantly evolving and new species can occur at any time. I worked on a small island where we knew a species of bird was breeding in two groups (some birds were laying eggs in the summer and some in the winter). At first we thought they were just different populations from the same species but as we study them closely we realised they were already different enough (not so much in how they looked but how they sounded and behaved) to be different species and so a new species of bird was found that way!
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Claire El Mouden answered on 20 Jun 2013:
Yes! Loads!
When I was at school, I did some work experience in a lab. I was bored so I took some soil from outside the building and looked at it under the microscope. I found this tiny little mite (less than 0.1mm long) that had little spikes all over it. It was so small you could not see it with just your eyes. The person I was working with told me it was probably a new species, and that there were masses of tiny creatures that were ‘not known to science’ – meaning no one had described them and named them.
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