How do researchers know when they’ve discovered a new species?
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Specifically: (1) how can they be certain it’s a new species and (2) how do they determine it’s *actually* new as opposed to a slight variation of a known species?
Sometimes it’s obvious (e. g. olinguito, a big furry mammal we’ve never seen before.)
With other species that are closely related (visually) to existing ones, it’s generally various bits of body measurements (morphology), including (and especially) skeletons if possible.
Another way to do it is DNA sequencing… you can generally tell how distant two groups of species are with a little bit of comparing their DNA. This is currently done in conjunction with the morphological studies I mentioned above.
However, there really are no hard and fast rules for where you would draw the line, and there our countless nitpicky arguments ongoing for various closely related groups, and what constitutes separate species (which can sometimes bleed into the comfortable / political realm.)
My dad discovered a new species of insect (we think) a while back while he was hand-rearing some collected larvae in his basement. What he thought was a funny larvae of species X turned out grew up to look nothing like species X.
First he had to pull a bunch of papers and borrow physical collections from nearby universities to double-check. He found no record of this species existing. Apparently he found evidence that both the larvae and adults of this type had been collected in the past but since nobody had sat around and observed their life cycle directly, they were horrifically mislabeled in vials as various other species.
Then, once he was confident enough to stake research money on it, he had to collect and send in all the relevant DNA samples to a contract sequencing company. They sent all the data back to him, there are online tools like BLAST you can use to compare and analyze sequenced DNA. Tools were showing quite a lot of differences which again confirms probably a new species.
Now he gets to write up a paper presenting all of this, and get it published, which takes months. He has a proposed latin name for it and if all the other researchers that work with those insects agree, they’ll start including it in their own work. I believe there’s no official source that certifies new species.
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