Thousands of scientists who thought they had discovered a new species face disappointment today.
More than 190,000 scientific names have been deleted from a register of all known sea life after researchers found that they were duplicates.
A sea snail commonly found on Britain’s coast had been given 113 names by scientists and collectors who all thought they had discovered a new species. Now the World Register of Marine Species has deleted 112 of those names after finding that they all described the “rough periwinkle”, first identified in 1792. The register, compiled by 200 scientists, lists 228,000 marine species, including 1,000 types of fish that have been found since 2008. New species include 122 sharks and rays and 131 members of the goby family.
Jan Mees, director of the Flanders Marine Institute in Belgium, who led the work, said that it would help to reduce the amount of time and public money wasted by scientists who were eager to claim a breakthrough.
He said that an estimated 10,000 new species were in jars in laboratories around the world waiting to be described, and up to two million more had yet to be discovered.
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“It is humbling to realise that humankind has encountered and described only a fraction of our oceanic kin, perhaps as little as 11 per cent,” Dr Mees said.
An average of four new marine species were named every day last year, including a venomous giant jellyfish, two dolphins in Australia and Brazil and 139 sponges.