In a world first, a global audit merging multiple technologies has uncovered dozens of new species of turtle, tortoise and terrapin, from all major inhabited continents that were previously unknown to science.
Raymond Hoser, known globally as The Snakeman has just published two book-sized volumes in the peer reviewed Australasian Journal of Herpetology formally naming 35 new species and 21 new species.
These previously unnamed species come from places as diverse as Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, India, Algeria, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, DR Congo, South Africa, the USA, Mexico, Panama, Colombia and Brazil.
Hoser has in previous years named other turtle species from Australia, New Guinea, the USA and Asia and has been recognized for decades as the world's foremost turtle expert.
This ground-breaking world-first global audit of the world's turtles, tortoises and terrapins merged all available DNA sequences (re-analysed as a group), museum specimens from major collections in Europe, the USA and elsewhere, previously published scientific literature, including from the 1800's, photo archives, paleo-geographical records, climate records spanning the past 65 MYA and wildlife trade records to check every known turtle on the planet to see if there were species until now hidden from science.
In most cases, the newly identified species were checked against old literature and bodies in museums and found to have been properly identified and named in the past, but to have been effectively ignored by science in a process known as synonymisation.
This is when a newly named form is treated as being another previously named species, where under the rules of naming species, the first available name is used.
While synonymisation of forms is common and often necessary, especially when poor quality science results in the renaming of previously named forms, sometimes species are synomymized and forgotten about in error due to one scientist synonymising a form by way of judgement call and the action not being tested or questioned by others as new data amerges.
Hoser tested every synonymisation in history (for turtles) and while the majority were correct, he still found plenty that were not.
Hence, the audit by Hoser yielded dozens of species improperly synonymized in the past and those were simply resurrected as "valid species" with the old names used.
Where no names were available, Raymond Hoser assigned new names to these species or subspecies, this being a combined number exceeding 50 taxa!
At the start of the audit, which took some years, Hoser expected to be able to find less than ten unnamed species or subspecies of turtles on the planet.
Turtles have for many years been regarded as "over-split" and not good prospecting ground for those seeking to discover a new species.
Hoser later said "I did the audit literally from A to Z, of all the world's turtles and never hit any "jackpot" of species as such ... there was not one single group that had not been done over by scientists in the past .... but one new species turned up unexpectedly in some remote corner of the world, then further into the audit, I found another, then later on a small cluster, one turned up in another place and so on. Finally after countless hours of sifting through specimens and data, I ended up naming 35 new species, plus a pile of subspecies."
A small number of species may have been missed, but Hoser said he thinks he got most of the hitherto unnamed forms.
In terms of vertebrates, Turtles are relatively large, naturally occur in large numbers (unless hunted excessively by people) and therefore are very hard to miss.
The likelihood of someone going to some remote place and catching a previously unnamed form of turtle is not very great, but in zoology and the business of discovering new species, only a fool would say all has been found.
Turtles are also among the most threatened of vertebrate species.
Nearly half the world's known species (there are about 400 living species) are on various endangered or threatened species lists.
Turtles are threatened directly from people seeking to kill and eat them, the medicine trade in places like China, causing depletions across the planet, the exotic pet trade, introduced pet species, including other species of turtles, pollution of their rivers with toxic chemicals, fungal diseases, parasite plagues and more.
Another more sinister threat is that of unethical "Synonymisation" or so-called Kaiserism (named after the notorious Hinrich Kaiser of Victor Valley, USA, who championed the practice as a means to attack his rivals and their works).
Petty jelousies among so called scientists sometimes results in one cohort pretending that species discovered by someone outside their group does not exist.
If they peddle their veiws far and wide enough, or convince governments to ignore the newly named species, they may even become extinct before the relevant governments can legislate to protect them.
People like Hinrich Kaiser have publicly taken pleasure from the extinction of species named by people they see as rivals, adding another sinister layer to the problems facing endangered wildlife species.
In 2009, a cohort of pseudo-scientists, known as the Wuster gang of thieves, headed by Welsh criminal Wolfgang Wuster, tried to suppress usage of scientific names of Snakeman Raymond Hoser, resulting in a petition to the governing body, called the International Commission of Zoological Nomenclature, or ICZN.
In April 2021, the ICZN ruled in favour of Snakeman Raymond Hoser and demanded that his correct ICZN names be used and that alternative non-ICZN names of the Wuster gang of thieves should not be used.
The many Wuster gang petitions were as a group, all literally thrown out by the ICZN as being evil (unethical) and illegal.
By the rules of the ICZN, the Wuster gang names, illegally coined by the gang, in a brazen attempt to steal the works and findings of Hoser had to be synonymized with the earlier Hoser names.
The ICZN rule of priority means that the first name placed on a species is that which it must always be known by.
The ICZN says that this is so that the person who has done the hard work to find and discover a new species is known as the discoverer and not some fake scientist or thief who seeks to steal the works of others some years later.
The Wuster gang have in the past engaged in sophisticated rackets, whereby they have scammed millions of dollars from governments ostensibly to fund scientific research projects, when in fact they have been publishing rehashes of other people's works, without doing any real research themselves and instead of spending the grant money on scientific research as claimed, they have been diverting the cash to fund their ever growing property portfolios and foreign bank accounts.
Details about the ICZN case (3601), refusing the demands of the Wuster gang can be found on the link below.