It's hard to imagine that new species of animals are still discovered, at least in accessible locations. Sure, anyone expects new things to be found thousands of meters below the surface of the ocean or deep in unexplored jungles.
The internet though is not the first place that comes to mind when looking for new species. It's probably not the tenth thing that comes to mind either.
But that's where Semachrysa Jade, a new species of green lacewing, was discovered. Specifically, it was discovered on Flickr, where an entomologist, Shaun Winterton, was scouring recent photos of insects.
Among them was one taken by Hock Ping Guek in Malaysia that he realized was unlike anything he found before.
Conferring with several other experts, he concluded that it was a brand new species unknown to science. The entomologist got in touch with the photographer and instructed him to get ahold of a specimen without which the new species couldn't have been made official.
Guek managed to find another specimen a year later and sent it to Steve Brooks, an entomologist at the Natural History Museum in London for identification.
Brooks confirmed that it was new and, as luck would have it, he also found another specimen in the museum's collection which had not been classified yet and had been sitting there for decades.
This was more than enough to mark the insect as a new species, which was named Semachrysa Jade. Jade doesn't actually come from its color but is actually the name of Winterton's daughter.
The two entomologists and the photographer then collaborated on the scientific paper, via Google Docs no less, which was later published
in the latest issue of the ZooKeys scientific journal, along with the story of how it was discovered.
What's interesting is that discoveries like this are only bound to become more common as more people have the technology to both photograph new species and make those photographs available online.