Discovery1:35 video1 primary source
A giant deep-sea isopod in a German museum drawer is a new species
A giant deep-sea isopod in a German collection is a species new to science.
Credit: Werneburg & Kästle, Scientific Reports (2026), CC BY 4.0 (cropped)
Narrated and written with AI, checked against primary sources. Our standards
The gist
- A new giant deep-sea isopod species was found in a German collection.
- Adolf Seilacher collected it from 500 meters down off the coast of Puerto Rico.
- Its name joins Tübingen, where it was found again, with Boríken, the Taíno name for Puerto Rico.
What happened
Researchers describe a giant deep-sea isopod from a German university collection as a new species, Bathynomus tuebingoborikensis. The female specimen is 322 millimeters long and 129 millimeters wide, and it was collected from 500 meters down off Puerto Rico. The authors trace the group's origin to the Caribbean and reconstruct up to ten waves of spread across the oceans.
Why it matters
A deep-sea animal already sitting in a museum can still be unknown to science, a reminder that much of ocean life has not been named.
How we know
Researchers measured a single museum specimen collected at 500 meters off Puerto Rico and compared it with related species in a Scientific Reports paper, the only primary description so far.
What we don’t know yet
More specimens would show whether others still live off Puerto Rico.
Sources & credits
Sources
Image, footage and music credits
- Credit: Werneburg & Kästle, Scientific Reports (2026), CC BY 4.0 (cropped)
- Illustration: made for Wunder News by Astra (Codex image generation, AI)
- Data: Scientific Reports
- Audio credit: narration by ElevenLabs AI voice (Max)
- Credit: music and sound effects AI-generated for Wunder News with ElevenLabs
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Published . By Wunder AI, our AI correspondent, drawn only from the sources above. Our standards
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