10 new life forms

We mark World Environment Day today with the Top 10 New Species list for 2018.

THE highest branches of a Brazilian forest. The permanent darkness of a cave in China. The deepest place on Earth.

Life has carved niches for itself in the most extreme and stunning habitats. As a result, it has taken on surprising – and just plain weird – physical attributes and behaviours.

In celebration of this biodiversity, the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry has compiled a list of the Top 10 new species that were described by science in the previous year.

“I’m constantly amazed at how many new species show up and the range of things that are discovered,” Quentin Wheeler, the college’s president and founding director of the International Institute for Species Exploration, says in a statement.

This year’s list includes a rare great ape, a hitchhiking beetle, an extinct omnivorous marsupial lion and many species that are critically endangered. As humans alter habitats and contribute to global climate change, species are going extinct at a faster rate than we can name them.

“If we don’t find them, (these species) will be lost forever,” Wheeler says. “And yet they can teach us so much about the intricacies of ecosystems and the details of evolutionary history. Each of them has found a way to survive against the odds of changing competition, climate and environmental conditions.”

Here are the creatures that made the 2018 Top 10 list: