I was quite excited last week when I heard they'd discovered a new species of big cat in Borneo: a clouded leopard, about the size of a small Labrador.
Why doesn't this happen more often, I thought to myself. Then I did an internet search and found that, actually, it does. It's just that, presumably, the new species discovered aren't deemed to be as photogenic or exciting as a leopard, and so don't get announced on primetime news.
Terrible, isn't it? I mean, it's one thing that the media are only interested in the young, beautiful or powerful in human life, but when they start to apply it to the natural world, too, then surely things have gone too far?
But, then, I suppose I can rather see the problem. While I would be glued to BBC news 24 at the advent of a new sort of elephant (one with wings would be nice. Or two trunks and striped like a zebra), I don't really feel I can thrill to the news that scientists have discovered two new types of eyeless albino millipede in Arizona. (Urg. Eyeless? Albino? Chaps, those little critters were hiding for a reason.) Similarly, a new sort of beetle does not feel like something to put the bunting up about. This is nothing to do with the fact that they are nasty, shiny, scrabbly little devils and that I once found two of them under my pillow, leaving me a legacy of obsessive-compulsive pillow-checking and a fear of papery whispering. Nope, nothing at all like that.
It is simply because, with 350,000 known species of beetle, I haven't seen a large fraction of the ones we know about.
And with the total number of species of beetle in existence reckoned to be anything from five to eight million, frankly it would be more of a shock to come across the same kind twice.
I've probably extinguish entire family trees just playing swingball. (But not on purpose. I would never do that. Even though they did hide under my pillow and scar me for life.) However, since I don't want to feed the media's obsession with appearance by banging on about those more attractive' discoveries (like, say, the six-wired bird of paradise, the 14 millimetres frog or the golden mantled tree kangaroo), I thought I'd do my bit for equality by giving a little airtime to those less glamorous but equally new-to-us species out there.
For some reason, at this point, I'm imagining a catwalk, so just go with it: firstly, we have the rather unusual new kind of weed, spotted minding its own business in York railway station car park. Isn't she lovely?
Next we have the fish from Brazil which looks and acts like a Dog Snapper but, in actual fact, has different markings and colourings to a Dog Snapper. That's it, darling, give us a twirl.
And here we have a new sort of bamboo, she's called Hill Cane. She likes to drop her leaves in the autumn and is joining us all the way from North Africa . . . zzzzz . . .
Oh sod it. Where's the article about that lovely leopard?
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