Scientists Add 260 New Species to the Record — Even as Many Near Extinction

Deep in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest, a trapdoor spider dies in its burrow and something else takes its place. Weeks later, a pale stalk pushes through the spider’s hinged door and into the light, releasing spores from a fungus scientists had never seen before — and only just managed to name.

The fungus, Purpureocillium atlanticum, is one of hundreds of plants, animals and fungi that officially joined the scientific record last year. This week, researchers at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in London and the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco released annual tallies that together add more than 260 new taxa to the tree of life. Many of them, scientists say, are already in trouble.

In statements Jan. 7 and 8, the two institutions reported that their staff and collaborators formally described 72 new species from around the world at the California Academy in 2025, and 190 plants and fungi at Kew — 125 plants and 65 fungi, including 175 species, a subspecies, 13 genera and a new family.

The announcements are meant to celebrate discovery. But they also underline a more sobering point: in the midst of rapid habitat loss and climate change, scientists are racing to identify species before they vanish.

“At a time when biodiversity loss is accelerating, much of life on Earth remains undocumented and therefore unprotected,” Shannon Bennett, chief of science at the California Academy of Sciences, said in a written statement. “By describing species and adding them to our collections, we strengthen our ability to conserve and regenerate ecosystems.”

A ‘zombie fungus,’ a Galápagos heron, and a Big Bend wildflower

The new taxa span six continents and three oceans, from deserts and national parks to deep-sea reefs. They include beetles, katydids, geckos, sea slugs, orchids, palms and that Brazilian “zombie fungus” that hijacks trapdoor spiders.

They also include a bird that tourists in one of the world’s most famous archipelagos have been photographing for decades.

For more than a century, the Galápagos lava heron was treated as a subspecies of the widespread striated heron. In 2025, a team led by researcher Ezra Mendales and California Academy ornithology curator Jack Dumbacher showed that the dark, slate-gray bird is distinct enough to be considered its own species, Butorides sundevalli.

Genetic analyses revealed that the lava heron is more closely related to North American herons than to South American striated herons. Measurements from museum specimens in San Francisco, New York and Chicago showed it has a larger, stronger bill than its mainland relatives.

The bird is common along the volcanic shorelines of the Galápagos, where its plumage helps it blend into lava rocks. Mendales said in the academy’s release that the work shows how even a familiar bird in a heavily studied place can remain scientifically unresolved for decades, and that evolution in the islands is still reshaping species.

Another of the academy’s headline discoveries lay underfoot in Texas.

In Big Bend National Park, botanists confirmed that a tiny, fuzzy wildflower first flagged on the community science platform iNaturalist represented not just a new species but a new genus in the sunflower family. The plant, Ovicula biradiata, or “wooly devil,” grows close to the ground in harsh, rocky soils and blooms briefly after rain — the kind of “belly plant” that usually requires a person to lie down to see it clearly.

Academy botanist Isaac Lichter Marck, who led the description, said it is the first time in nearly 50 years that both a new genus and species of plant have been described from a U.S. national park. The genus name, Ovicula, means “tiny sheep,” a reference to the plant’s woollike hairs and to the desert bighorn sheep, an endangered icon of Big Bend.

“People often assume that national parks in the United States are already fully documented,” Lichter Marck said in the release. “Discoveries like this show that even these well-known landscapes still hold surprises.”

From deep-sea collections to ‘twilight zone’ reefs

The academy’s list also included a deep-sea cardinalfish, Epigonus zonatus, collected nearly 2,000 feet below the surface off Cuba in 1997 during a manned submersible expedition attended by then-President Fidel Castro. The specimen sat in the academy’s collection for almost 30 years before being formally described by ichthyologists John McCosker and Douglas Long.

Farther east, academy researchers working on so-called “twilight zone” reefs — dimly lit habitats between roughly 100 and 500 feet deep — named a small, shy perchlet, Plectranthias raki, from the Maldives. Unlike most of its relatives, which are patterned with vertical bars, the fish has light red blotches that stood out even in low light, ichthyology curator Luiz Rocha said.

Rocha, who dives with rebreathers to reach these depths, has repeatedly reported seeing plastic trash and fishing lines on reefs once thought to be insulated from human activity.

Kew’s top 10: taxogenomics, endangered orchids, and a plant that may be gone

Kew’s 2025 tally focused on plants and fungi and was accompanied by an annual “top 10” list designed to spotlight particularly striking or significant species.

Near the top was Purpureocillium atlanticum, the spider-infecting fungus from Brazil’s Atlantic Forest. The fungus envelops its trapdoor spider host in a cotton-like growth, then produces a fruiting body that forces its way through the spider’s door to disperse spores above ground.

What made this discovery especially notable to Kew scientists was the way it was made. A team led by mycologist João Araújo and Kew science director Alex Antonelli used a handheld Oxford Nanopore DNA sequencer in the field to read the fungus’s genetic code almost in real time, an approach they described as “taxogenomics.”

Another Kew highlight, an Andean orchid named Telipogon cruentilabrum, or “bloodstained lip,” bears bright yellow flowers streaked with red veins. In the wild, in high montane forest in Ecuador’s Cotopaxi province, it grows on tree daisies several feet above the ground. Like its relatives, the orchid is thought to attract male flies by mimicking the appearance of females, tricking them into attempting to mate with the flower and pollinating it in the process.

More than half of the species’ habitat has already been cleared, Kew reported, and trees continue to be removed for mining and agriculture. Botanists have informally assessed the orchid as endangered.

Other additions on Kew’s list ranged from a three-meter shrub from Peru with orange-red and yellow flowers, Aphelandra calciferi, named after Calcifer, the fire demon in the Japanese animated film Howl’s Moving Castle, to a massive Cameroonian rainforest tree, Plagiosiphon intermedium, estimated to weigh five tons. A new palm from the Philippines, Adonidia zibabaoa, known locally as amuring, was assessed as critically endangered.

In some cases, species appear to have been named too late. Kew said a Cameroonian plant, Cryptacanthus ebo, from the Ebo Forest may already be extinct in the wild.

Martin Cheek, a senior botanist at Kew and co-author of the top-10 list, said in the institution’s statement that human activities are “eroding nature to the point of extinction.” He added that taxonomists can no longer assume a newly described species will persist for generations; many are already threatened by the time they are named.

A race to name life before it disappears

Kew’s broader analyses underscore that warning. Its 2023 State of the World’s Plants and Fungi report estimated that roughly three out of four yet-to-be-described vascular plant species are likely already threatened with extinction. It also suggested that about 45% of known flowering plant species could be at risk. For fungi, scientists estimate more than 2 million species exist worldwide, but a little over 200,000 have been named and less than 1% have been assessed for extinction risk.

Those findings align with a 2019 assessment by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, which concluded that up to 1 million animal and plant species face extinction in coming decades because of land and sea-use change, overexploitation, climate change, pollution and invasive species.

Despite those numbers, funding for the basic work of describing and cataloging life remains limited. A global analysis of conservation spending over a 25-year period found that about 83% of nearly $2 billion in targeted funds went to vertebrates, particularly large mammals and birds, while plants and invertebrates each received about 6.6%. Fungi and algae together received less than 0.2%. Nearly 94% of threatened species received no direct funding.

Against that backdrop, institutions such as Kew and the California Academy have increasingly leaned on vivid storytelling, pop-culture references and local languages to draw attention to little-known organisms. Several of the academy’s new sea slugs from California, for example, carry names derived from Indigenous Ohlone and Kumeyaay words for “salmon” and “yellow.” Kew’s list features a “fire demon” shrub and a “caterpillar orchid.”

Scientists at both institutions argue that naming and describing species is not an academic exercise but a prerequisite for conservation and policy. Without a formal description and type specimen, a plant or animal often cannot be assessed for the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List or for protection under national endangered species laws.

“Taxonomy gives us the language to talk about what we might lose,” Kew fungal researcher Irina Druzhinina said in the garden’s release. She described fungi as “a huge, barely explored frontier” with millions of species yet to be identified.

For now, the frontier continues to yield surprises — in the lava fields of the Galápagos, the canyons of Big Bend, the subalpine grasslands of the Balkans and the burrows of unsuspecting spiders in Brazil. Each new species adds a branch to the tree of life. Whether those branches endure, scientists say, will depend less on how quickly they can be named than on how quickly the world chooses to protect the places where they grow, crawl and bloom.