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Asked by anon-253602 on 7 May 2020.
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Jacque Cilliers answered on 7 May 2020:
Great question.
We can look at animals in two major ways:
What they look like on the outside
AND
What they look like on the inside (DNA)With some animals its really easy to tell that they are different. They LOOK different. Like an elephant from India and one from Africa. Indian elephants are smaller and their ears are different. This makes them different species.
Sometimes its not that easy. Sometimes animals look very similar to each other and its not easy to tell the difference. When this happens, we look at the DNA. If the DNA is different (this has to be significantly different), then we start to think that they are different species.
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Daire Harvey-Carroll answered on 7 May 2020:
Great question! When we discover a new species we choose what is called a “type specimen” that’s an example of the species that is stored in a museum or botanical garden. For animals this might be a skeleton or specimen preserved in alcohol. For a plant its normally pressed flowers or leaves.
When we think we’ve found a new species we check it against all the type specimens to make sure it isn’t the same as one of them.
We can also take a short cut by looking at their DNA – the unique code in all our bodies that makes us who we are. If the new species has a very different DNA code from anything we’ve seen before than we can be pretty sure it hasn’t been discovered yet!
Scientists that work in this field are called Taxonomists.
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Michelle Valkanas answered on 7 May 2020:
This is a great question and becomes increasingly harder to do as the organism gets smaller. For example I study bacteria and going on physical characteristics is near impossible. While we can rely on metabolism and what the organism use in its environment to survive and grow, DNA is the primary source of identifying novel (new) bacteria. What makes this even more difficult is bacteria can share their DNA! This sometimes can lead to misidentification of a new organism.
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Oli Wilson answered on 8 May 2020: last edited 8 May 2020 9:26 am
As the others have said, this is a really good question – and it’s really important! If a creature doesn’t have a scientific name and description it’s much harder to plan conservation efforts for it, or research where it’s found. DNA and physical characteristics are the main way of figuring out how closely related your new specimen is to existing species, but it doesn’t have to be completely different from everything ever found before. It’s very common for taxonomists (the scientists who research and name new species) to discover that they have old collections of new species – maybe stored under different/old names, or just in a cupboard of unidentified samples. When a new species is described, taxonomists go through related specimens and check whether any are actually the new species. It’s constantly changing!
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Lydia Cole answered on 8 May 2020:
Hi Daniel,
That’s a very good question! It’s easier to know whether you’ve discovered a new species of monkey than a new species of beetle, for example, as there are many fewer monkey species out there than species of beetles, and monkeys are larger animals and easier to spot. The key to knowing if you’ve discovered a new species is to know as much as you can about the group of animals you’re studying – which species have already been named within the group – or to call an expert for that species who will know if you’ve found an individual with enough unique characteristics that it might be a new species. The Natural History Museum in London would probably know who the right expert is to contact, or a search on the internet.
As well as trying to figure out if the animal or plant you’ve found hasn’t been discovered before, you also have to figure out if it’s different enough from all of the named species and so deserves to be called a new one. There are different ways of finding out if it’s different enough, for example, if it’s genetic code (DNA) is different in enough places as the next most similar species, or if it can’t breed and produce healthy offspring with the next most similar species, amongst other ways of finding out.
There are still millions of undiscovered species out there, especially in the world of insects and micro-organisms. Let us know if you think you’ve spotted one!
Lydia
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