Mother nature always repackaging creatures

As featured March 23, 2012, on www.cnjonline.com

Traipsing through dense plants while swatting at exotic blood-sucking insects and side-stepping vipers, some guy in a floppy hat stops to flip over a chunk of rotting wood and BINGO!

A new species is added to the list.

In the daily grind of alarm clock-drive-work-drive-chores-dinner-TV-lights out-alarm clock, it's easy to believe everything is all figured out, everything that exists is named and “new” is defined by smaller, faster circuitry.

But people aren't the only ones who are creative, and for all our innovation, we certainly have a lot to learn about our world.

Take, for instance, the downright adorable and newly discovered “Brookesia Micra.”

At roughly an inch, the insect sized chameleon has to take a couple steps to make it from one side of a finger tip to the other – so take that Silicon Valley!

Miniaturized to a level of perfection that would have further inspired Lewis Carroll, the reptile was discovered in northern Madagascar, known for its threatened, yet diverse chameleon populations.

What might be even more intriguing about the little guy (and yes, it is the male in the species that boasts the smallest size) is that its size is most likely a direct response to a small environment, a phenomenon called “island dwarfism” in which the size of some creatures adapts to limited land and resources.

Did Charles Darwin figure out everything the Galapagos Islands had to offer and the rest is history?

Not exactly... Actually, not even close.

Recently, deep sea diving scientists discovered a new foot-long catshark species around the volcanic islands almost 200 years after the HMS Beagle conveyed Darwin to their shores for his brief exploration there.

And the experts think they've barely scratched the surface of yet-undiscovered life existing on and around the 3,000 square miles or so of land framed by the South Pacific Ocean.

In a cave near the Black Sea, more than a mile from the closest sun rays, a team of researchers recently discovered eyeless springtails, a type of arthropod which they believe to be the deepest animal known to live below the surface of the earth.

Admittedly a bit creepy looking, the legless and slithery Chikilidae appears to be a Jurassic country cousin within the frog family, was recently discovered in India. Making up for its looks, matronly love is a redeeming quality of the unattractive Chikilidae, with mom spending more than two months wrapped around her eggs without budging, not even to eat.

New types of frogs are one of the more commonly discovered critters with the Cowboy frog (it wears spurs) included in a group of 46 new species discovered during recent expeditions in South America, and the worlds smallest frog in New Guinea, the Paedophryne amauensis, which is small enough to fit on a dime and sounds like a cricket.

But perhaps the most astounding was a new type of leopard frog discovered when it croaked, not in the jungles of the rainforest but rather in the exotic concrete jungles of America, more specifically, Yankee Stadium of all places. Turns out there's a lot of them and they call the Bronx home.

So rest assured, while there may be nothing new under the sun, there's no shortage of new old stuff to be found and with her tendency to adapt things and rearrange the furniture, Mother Nature is always repackaging old stuff in new ways.