New Land Snail Species Named In Honor Of Gay Marriage Movement
Monday, October 13, 2014 - 11:01
in Paleontology & Archaeology
A research team has discovered that a snail long confused with a far more common snail is actually distinct - and so they named it Aegista diversifamilia. 'Diverse family' being in honor of the modern gay marriage movement, the authors say. Aegista subchinensis of Taiwan was first described in 1884. In 2003, one of the co-authors Dr. Yen-Chang Lee noticed that there was morphological divergence between the western and eastern populations of A. subchinensis, separated by the Central Mountain Range, a major biogeographic barrier in Taiwan. Lee suggested that there might be cryptic species within the one identified as A. subchinensis at the time. read more