Date:April 27, 2016
Source:Pensoft Publishers
Recent fieldwork has uncovered a new species of scorpion in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in northeastern California. It is related to several species in its genus, and is only the fourth new species of scorpion to be described from California in the past twenty years.
California is known for its high biological diversity. The state encompasses a wide variety of habitats, from temperate coastal scrub and cool redwood forests to high-elevation conifer forests and grasslands that are home to an equally diverse variety of plants and animals. Biologists have been intensively studying and characterizing the biodiversity of California for centuries.
Recent fieldwork by researchers Warren Savary and Rob Bryson uncovered a new species of scorpion in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in northeastern California. It is related to several species in the genus Pseudouroctonus, and is only the fourth new species of scorpion to be described from California in the past twenty years. The description is published in the open access journal ZooKeys.
The lead author, Warren Savary, is a field associate of the California Academy of Sciences and has been studying the scorpion diversity of California since the 1970s. He and a collaborator described a new species endemic to the White and Inyo Mountains in eastern California in 1991.
"California is home to a remarkable variety of scorpions," says Savary. "However, the more I study them, the more I realize that we've only just scratched the surface. A lot of scorpion diversity remains to be described." He and co-author Rob Bryson, a researcher at the University of Washington, have started using DNA to help better understand scorpion diversity.
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