Tuesday, February 20, 2018

The Latest New Shark is a Resurrected Species

It's very hard to keep up with the sharks. In my adult lifetime we have gone from about 300 species to 450 and climbing. Now the Atlantic sixgill shark, up to 1.7m long, has been proven distinct from those in other oceans thanks to genetic analysis. The species Hexanchus vitulus was actually proposed in 1969, later dropped in a consolidation with other sixgills, and has now been resurrected in an example of what genetic analysis can add to the traditional classification by physical characteristics.  Here's the paper

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