Sunday, June 19, 2011

In The Unlikeliest of Places

After hundreds of years of exploration, discovery and research, we’ve learned quite a lot about our planet.  You would think that after all of this time, there would be hardly any living thing left on Earth that we hadn’t yet found.  Well, you would be wrong.  Way wrong, actually.  Our planet is loaded with life.  New species are constantly being discovered – hundreds a year.  If I did a blog post every time a new species was discovered, I’d be posting multiple times a day.  Today’s blog post, however, is about one new species in particular which stands out among the rest.

The Amazon is
bursting with life
New species are often found in areas of the world that are harder for us to explore.  Oceans are a good example.  Rainforests are a great example.  The rainforests of the Amazon and Madagascar are constantly revealing new creatures to us.  Researchers in a rainforest in Borneo recently discovered a new species of mushroom that looks like a colorful sea sponge.  So much so, in fact, that they named the species Spongiforma squarepantsii, which is officially the most ridiculous species name I’ve heard since Dracorex hogwartsia.