[HN Gopher] Fossil species found living off southern California;...
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       Fossil species found living off southern California; notes on the
       genus Cymatioa
        
       Author : bookofjoe
       Score  : 19 points
       Date   : 2022-11-09 21:26 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (zookeys.pensoft.net)
 (TXT) w3m dump (zookeys.pensoft.net)
        
       | bmitc wrote:
       | Do I have this right: a mollusk previously known only from fossil
       | records (and thus extinct) has been found as a living (and thus
       | extant) species?
       | 
       | Is this common (or more common than you'd think) for insects and
       | mollusks and other such animals?
        
         | MichaelCollins wrote:
         | I feel like I've seen stories about this sort of thing
         | happening a few times at least; almost invariably the newly
         | [re]discovered animal is very similar to another species that
         | was already known to be alive, so while still a significant
         | discovery it lacks some punch. In this case the presumed-
         | extinct animal is quite similar to C. electilis, which was
         | known to be around in the modern era but apparently is poorly
         | documented (the article says living specimens of C. electilis
         | are undocumented so they could only compare the shells.) These
         | are the only two known living members of the genus and both are
         | rare, so it seems like a fairly significant discovery to me.
         | Not really a case of "animals previously thought to be one
         | species are now reclassified as two", like many other species
         | discoveries seem to be.
         | 
         | I think situations like the Coelacanth, where the rediscovered
         | animal is unlike any other already known to be alive, are quite
         | rare. Although even in that case, the Coelacanth was a
         | revelation to science but probably not the fishermen that
         | caught it.
        
         | AnimalMuppet wrote:
         | They just found a cockroach in Australia that had been thought
         | to be extinct.
         | 
         | So, maybe more common than you'd think? Definitely not common,
         | though - these findings are news for a reason.
        
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       (page generated 2022-11-09 23:00 UTC)