Man discovers a new life-form at a South African truck stop

By Rob Dunn | Apr 26, 2011

Like many biologists, the German biologist Oliver Zompro spends thousands of hours looking at specimens of dead animals. He found his first new species when he was twenty. By the age of thirty he had named dozens of wild new forms. While other people around him did crossword puzzles and drank lattes, he explored the world, one animal at a time.

Then, one day, things changed. He was looking through specimens when he found something more interesting than anything he had ever seen before. It was a fossil that looked like a cross between two different kinds of animals. It had the wrong mix of parts. It was--he would come to convince himself--a single individual of an entirely new order of beasts.

An order is one of the big categories of life, a big branch on evolution's tree. Animal species are named every day, but finding another new order would be equivalent to discovering bats having not previously known they existed. Bats constitute their own order, as do primates, beetles, flies and rodents.

It is easy to imagine that we have found all of them, living and dead. Yet the grass had parted for Zompro and revealed his treasure. He was not the first person to see it, but he was the first to recognize its significance and, he hoped, to give it a name.

But before Zompro went public with his find, he craved more specimens. He had found one specimen that other scientists had overlooked. It was at least theoretically possible that he might find others. And so he began to search, with zeal. First, he visited the Natural History Museum in London. It is filled with dead animals and so a good place to begin.

In the British Museum he found many false leads. Then, remarkably, he found some real ones. There, in the collection, was a male very similar to the one he had found in his native Germany, but with one key difference. The label attached to it indicated that it had been collected in Tanzania in 1955, alive. This new life form might still be around, a living fossil!

Zompro had struck gold. Amazingly, with a little more digging, he then did it again. He found another specimen in the Museum fur Naturkunde, Humboldt University in Berlin, this one a female from a 1909 collection in Namibia.

Zompro thought he had stumbled upon an entire evolutionary line that had survived the dinosaurs, survived the evolution of mammals and now just maybe had survived several hundred thousand years of human troublemaking.

Quickly, Zompro, his advisor and other colleagues wrote a paper on the new find in which they named the new order "Mantophasmatodea." Later the group would be given the common name, "heel walkers," which makes one think of other beasts of lore--yetis, sasquatch, and the like. Each of the individuals Zompro had discovered was named as a separate species. History would soon decide if the group was distinct enough to constitute its own order. In the meantime, Zompro and colleagues needed more specimens; they wanted to find these animals alive.

Zompro and colleagues decided go to Africa to look for more. Before they did, they needed to know where to look. Africa is big. This animal was, relatively speaking, small. The choice of sites was key, but little information existed on which to base the decision.

One of the specimens Zompro had found was from a relatively easy to reach site in Tanzania, but there was also a specimen from a far more isolated region of Namibia. In fact, the most recent specimens that turned up, one from 1991 and another from 2001, both came from the same place in Namibia, the Brandberg Massif. To the Massif they would go. In such faraway places, they imagined, living fossils like the one for which they were looking might survive.

Read full story: http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=man-discovers-new-life-form-at-sout-2011-04-26