Those people at Conservation International sure do love finding new species, chalking up over 700 in under 20 years. They’ve just done it again, this time in Papua New Guinea.

During a trip into the country’s highlands, researchers discovered a number of species new to science, including a gecko, two plants, three frogs and 50 (fifty!) spiders.

“If you’re finding things that are that big and that spectacular that are new, that’s really an indication that there’s a lot out there that we don’t know about,” says Steve Richards, the expedition’s leader (AP). “It never ceases to amaze me the spectacular things that are turning up from that island.”

Wayne Maddison, of the University of British Columbia, says the spiders are particularly important.

“They are strikingly distinctive evolutionary lineages that had been unknown before, with a group that is already very distinctive on the evolutionary tree of jumping spiders,” he says (press release). “Their key position on the evolutionary tree will help us understand how this unique group of jumping spiders has evolved.”

More

Previous CI discoveries, via Google news archive.

Image: © Steve Richards