A team led by Conservation International descended into the forests of Colombia to look for species of frogs not seen in decades and feared extinct. Some of the lost critters remain lost, but some new ones turned up, among them the beaked toad. Roughly the color of the dead leaves among which it lives, it is one of the only toad species that skips the tadpole stage and emerges from the egg as a fully formed toadlet. Its tiny, 2 cm (0.8 in.) size helps it hide from predators, but its most distinctive feature is its hooked snout. The expedition's lead scientist — in a singularly unscientific aside — compared the toad to "the nefarious villain Mr. Burns, from the Simpsons television series."
Say this for spiders: they know how to hoard food — particularly the newly discovered Darwin's bark spider, discovered in Madagascar. The most prodigious web-spinner of any known arachnid, the bark spider produces silk thought to be 100% tougher than any studied before. Good silk means good webs, and scientists found one example that stretched 25 m (82 ft.) across a Madagascar river. At least 30 insects were found trapped in the threads, meaning leisurely dining for the spider — and more food arriving all the time.
One of 200 new species discovered in Papua New Guinea, the tree ant makes its home about 1.8 mi. (2.9 km) above sea level. Conditions can be tough at such nosebleed altitudes, and the ants are thus adapted to both hot and dry and cold and wet conditions. The trick is a slow metabolism that allows them to make the most out of anything they eat and a tripwire jaw that helps them catch the most prey possible. The ant's mandibles are kept open a full 180 degrees and snap shut at the slightest brush against their touch sensitive hairs. Pity the soft-bodied insect that wanders across its path.
The New Guinea expedition discovered up to 30 new katydid species, including a green-skinned, pink-eyed beauty that copped most of the magazine glamour shots. But the no-nonsense Mossula was the one that most impressed the scientists. Equipped with unusually large and spiny hind legs, the Mossula makes the most of its natural weaponry. When threatened, it holds its legs straight up and jabs the spines at a potential enemy. The scientists — who look none too friendly from the katydid's perspective — discovered first-hand that this hurts.
Little frogs can make a lot of noise, as Malaysian and German scientists in Borneo discovered when they went searching for the critters making the rasping sounds that usually begin as the sun goes down. Tracking the calls to pitcher plants, the researchers laid out a white cloth and tapped the leaves to see if anything emerged. Out jumped copper-colored frogs about 10 mm (0.39 in.) long, the smallest adult frogs ever seen. How small? Put one on the edge of a penny and it has to make at least one big hop to reach Lincoln's head.
An awful lot of frogs could have avoided dissection if they'd been more like the members of the Centrolenidae family, a collection of frog species with transparent skin. A particularly adorable Centrolenidae specimen was discovered in Ecuador last year, so transparent that its beating heart is clearly visible. The new frog may be only one of about 150 glass frog species across South and Central America, but it's surely the cutest.
Odds are, you wouldn't describe a woolly rat — or any rat, for that matter — as "insanely spectacular." But you're not Steve Backshall, one of the leaders of an expedition that ventured into the Bosavi crater in Papua New Guinea late one evening in 2010. He and his team stumbled across a new species of rat, which, unlike skittish urban rats, showed no fear at all. "It was quite happy just munching on tubers in front of us," Backshall says. The rat's rounded snout gives it a less weasely look than the typical city variety, but don't go all cuddly yet. "It was about the size of a cat," Backshall says. "Quite a good-sized cat, actually. A cat that's been feeding extremely well." The good news is that the rat seems content in its crater, so the subways are probably safe — for now.
If it were a tiny bit less ugly it would be, well, just ugly. But the tube-nosed fruit bat, also hailing from Papua New Guinea, achieves the rare feat of being ugly-cute. Internet critter-lovers have been calling it Yoda, which is a fair enough comparison, except that Yoda doesn't fly through forests, pooping seeds from its fruit-based diet and helping new plants disperse and grow — or at least not in the first six films. Until he does, the fruit bat wins the award for being both cute and environmentally very useful.
There is almost nothing good to say about this critter, spotted in French Guiana a decade ago but announced formally only this year. It's from 1 to 3 in. long — which is too much spider for most people — and is covered in characteristic tarantula hair. It also has a taste for birds, which unsettlingly reverses the natural birds-eat-bugs order of things. The new tarantula does, however, come in bluetooth — which is to say is has cobalt blue teeth, and they're true beauties. O.K., so that's one nice thing you can say about it — but really, that's all.
Not every cool, newly discovered species is still out there eating, breeding and raising young. Case in point: the fossil of a giant penguin that lived 36 million years ago in what is now Peru. With samples of both feathers and flippers preserved with the bones the remains offered researchers rare clues to the color and plumage of the earliest penguins. Their conclusions: the extinct birds were nowhere near the fancy dressers their modern-day descendants are, coming mostly in a standard reddish-brown or gray. But what the penguin ancestors lacked in style they made up in size, standing twice the height of today's pipsqueak Emperor penguin.
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