ibs newsletter 3

summer/winter 2008- vol. 6, nº 2 Zoologists and botanists look to exotic places in order to find interesting new species and higher taxa. Over the last few centuries, scien-tific expeditions in remote places have indeed discovered new species and even higher taxa of limited distribution. Such discoveries still occur in recent years. The new insect order Mantophasmatodea in Namibia and Tanzania (Klass et al., 2002) was only known from fossil specimens in amber (Arillo et al., 1997). Even recently the new rodent species Laonastes aenigmamus was found in Laos; a new family was proposed to classify this species (Laonastidae; Jenkins et al., 2004), although it was later included in the Diatomydae (Dawson et al., 2006), a family that was also known only from fossil remnants (Mein & Ginsburg, 1997). The fact that in both cases these new higher taxa were already known from fossils does not diminish the need to explore remote areas to find new living branches in the mac-roscopic part of the tree of life. In contrast, collecting samples in remote ar-eas, scientists working on the less-known mi-croscopic organisms (smaller than 2mm) in-variably found species and higher taxa that could be ascribed to taxa already known from Europe (Fenchel & Finlay, 2003). Once com-pletely new higher taxa are discovered, they are quickly found to be widely distributed. The recently described microscopic animal phyla, Loricifera from marine sediments off the coas