MEXICO: Rough periwinkles found commonly around UK coast described as new species or sub-species over 100 timesA seaside snail found in rock pools on almost every stretch of coast around the UK has been named as the most misidentified creature in the world.
Rough periwinkles are commonly seen on shorelines around the North Atlantic but come with so many colour and shape variations that they have confused scientists for centuries.
Researchers cataloguing the world’s marine life have found that scientists claimed to have discovered the molluscs as different species and sub-species at least 113 times, more than any other animal or plant.
Rough periwinkles have now been crowned the “champion of taxonomic redundancy” by the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS). Their accepted scientific name is Littorina saxatilis, which comes from their first description in 1792 by naturalist Giuseppe Olivi.
Misidentifying animals and plants as new to science has hugely inflated the number of species recorded around the world in the scientific literature.
A reassessment has led to 190,400 marine species being deleted from the record books since 2008 because they had already been named and described. It leaves 228,450 accepted species.
Among the duplications is an octopus, Octopus rooseveltii, named in 1941 after US President Franklin D Roosevelt, which researchers now realise had originally been identified in 1904 as Octopus oculifer.
Jan Mees, co-chair of WoRMS, said the register provides “for the first time in history” a one-stop resource for researchers to check if specimens are new to science or if they have been beaten to them.
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