From a pile of untagged museum specimens, some over a century old, British Ph.D. candidate Sally Hall has pulled the evidence for four new species of king crabs, members of a family housing some of Earth's largest crustaceans. The four species represent four widely scattered areas of ocean.
COMMENT: This sort of find is important to zoology, more than most people realize. Going through old museum collections has yielded countless new species, including in recent years the world's largest gecko and the world's largest spider, and we don;t know what has been overlooked in museums and private collections around the world.
In case you are wondering, the new guys are:
Paralomis alcockiana, from the Atlantic Ocean,
Paralomis nivosa, from the Philippines,
Paralomis makarovi, from the Bering Sea, and
Lithodes galapagensis , the first king crab species recorded off the Galapagos Islands.
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