Today I saw a post about 10 species that are new to science in 2022 (a fish, an owl, a frog, plus others). The thing that stood out to me in the midst of all the other pieces of information flowing past me at the time was that phrase: "new to science."
Instead of saying 10 "discoveries" in 2022, the person who posted it (urbanist Gil Penalosa) stepped back from the usual wording and put it in a more accurate way. They're new to science, to the scientific record.
Who knows if they're discoveries? Maybe some humans have known about them, had names for them, for centuries or eons.
I appreciated that small moment of sanity in the midst of so much else wrong in the way the world is interpreted on a daily basis.
A sunbird from the Wakatobi Islands in central Indonesia. Many species have been recorded by scientists for the first time in this part of the Wallacea region in recent years, so that they regard it generally as an endemic bird area for the study of evolution. Photo by David J. Kelly (source)
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