WARREN FAHY

A few months after FRAGMENT debuted, this article came out describing what scientists discovered in Papua New Guinea in a volcanic crater nearly identical in size to Henders Island in Fragment. Nature imitates art! (Or the other way around?) Behold what they found inside the Bosavi Crater.

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“Despite decades of tirelessly scouring some of the most familiar and remote places on Earth,” says Shannon Bennett, Ph.D., and Academy Chief of Science, “biodiversity scientists estimate that more than 90% of nature’s species remain unknown. 

Humans have made their way to the moon, landed rovers on Mars and sent spacecraft to the outer reaches of the solar system. But the Earth remains a little-known planet. That becomes clear when naturalists look for creatures closer to home and find unknown gems. Here are our favorite new species of 2016.

In 2018, researchers added 229 new plant and animal species to Earth’s tree of life. The new species include 120 wasps, 34 sea slugs, 28 ants, 19 fish, seven flowering plants, seven spiders, four eels, three sharks, two water bears, one frog, one snake, one seahorse, one moss, and one liverwort plant.

"For decades, we have averaged 18,000 species discoveries per year which seemed reasonable before the biodiversity crisis. Now, knowing that millions of species may not survive the 21st century, it is time to pick up the pace," Quentin Wheeler, founding director of the International Institute for Species Exploration at ASU, said in a statement. "We are calling for a NASA-like mission to discover 10 million species in the next 50 years," Wheeler added.