15-80: Systematics from Zootaxa

It's taking forever to get through one issue of Evolution, so instead, I'm instituting a new policy. If I find a really neat story within the 65 stories in this year's issues of Zootaxa, I'll give them individual numbers, otherwise, they're all evolution.

When people describe new species, and assign them to their place in a taxonomy, they do it with an understanding that there is common descent. That's what systematists do, and Zootaxa has 65 papers describing new species. It isn't even the most prominent journal for new species descriptions.

Among the groups with new species:

• centipedes
• stoneflies
• moths
• bees
• birds
• snake eels
• frogs
• midges
• true bugs
• mealybugs
• snails
• leafhoppers
• fish
• caddisflies
• flies
• tardigrades (waterbears)
• catfish
• sea spiders
• fossil bats
• hermit crabs
• fossil chitons (molluscs)
• spider crabs
• mites
• clam shrimp
• killifishes
• crabs
• cichlid fishes
• more flies
• more bugs
• beetles
• more hermit crabs
• more moths
• ants
• more crabs
• spiders
• wasps
• nematode worms
• collembola (springtails)
• toads
• whitefly
• sponges
• more tardigrades
• weird fish
• more leafhoppers
• butterflies
• more beetles
• coral
• blackflies
• more catfish
• coccids
• braconid wasps
• fungus gnats

Some of these are new species discovered in the wild, others are new species discovered in a museum drawer. Some are in areas where that group hadn't been found before, but evolutionary hypotheses guided systematists to that island or that park. Other studies are re-examinations of a group to better reflect new knowledge of a group's evolutionary history. Each and every paper relies on evolution, poses new evolutionary hypotheses, and demonstrates evolution at work in the world today and for millions of years in the past.