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New species of shark discovered


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A team of scientists led by Florida Institute of Technology's Toby Daly-Engel has confirmed after decades of uncertainty that sixgill sharks residing in the Atlantic Ocean are a different species than their counterparts in the Indian and Pacific oceans.

The new species has a new name: the Atlantic sixgill shark.

With ancestors dating back over 250 million years, well before dinosaurs, sixgill sharks are among the oldest creatures on Earth. Yet the fact that they reside at extreme ocean depths, sometimes thousands of feet below the surface, has made them especially challenging to study.

https://phys.org/news/2018-02-species-shark-genetic.html

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So I take it's actually just reclassified? Not sure if reclassifying a species is the same as discovering a new species but I guess it depends how you look at it.

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6 hours ago, NightScreams said:

So I take it's actually just reclassified? Not sure if reclassifying a species is the same as discovering a new species but I guess it depends how you look at it.

Its not reclassifying a species NightScreams its discovering a new one completely

From the article 

"We showed that the sixgills in the Atlantic are actually very different from the ones in the Indian and Pacific Oceans on a molecular level, to the point where it is obvious that they're a different species even though they look very similar to the naked eye," Daly-Engel said

And these kinds of discoveries are important for many reasons one being

Again from the article

"Because we now know there are two unique species, we have a sense of the overall variation in populations of sixgills. We understand that if we overfish one of them, they will not replenish from elsewhere in the world," she said.

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It has been estimated that the oceans contain around 750,000 species that have not yet been discovered.

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16 hours ago, khol said:

Its not reclassifying a species NightScreams its discovering a new one completely

From the article 

"We showed that the sixgills in the Atlantic are actually very different from the ones in the Indian and Pacific Oceans on a molecular level, to the point where it is obvious that they're a different species even though they look very similar to the naked eye," Daly-Engel said

And these kinds of discoveries are important for many reasons one being

Again from the article

"Because we now know there are two unique species, we have a sense of the overall variation in populations of sixgills. We understand that if we overfish one of them, they will not replenish from elsewhere in the world," she said.

I was going by this:

"Science Center in Panama City, determined there are enough genetic differences between what had long been considered a single species, Hexanchus nakamurai, to rename the Atlantic variety Hexanchus vitulus.
"With their new classification, Atlantic sixgill sharks will now have a better chance at long-term survival,

Typically when you say "with this new classification" there would be an old classification..hence reclassified based on "enough genetic differences" for them to justify in doing so.  So they basically discovered what was already discovered, just without realization. So this shark has been seen, technically discovered except they thought it was Hexanchus Nakamurai but realized there's enough genetic differences to give it a new classification.....I don't really consider that the same as discovering a new species but rather "oh, we didn't realize this was a new species all this time"

But whatever, again it's how you look at it.

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