July 26, 2002	Friday	Jamadi-ul-Awwal 15,1423

NEW YORK: A new species of poisonous predator — a tiny centipede that may well be the world’s smallest — has been discovered in Central Park, the heart of the nation’s largest city, scientists said on Wednesday.

It is the first new species in more than a century to be discovered in the massive park, a New York City oasis that attracts more than 20 million visitors each year.

Like all centipedes, it is a carnivorous predator armed with venomous fangs, but the adult of the new species grows to be about 0.4 inches (10 mm) long, about half the usual length of centipedes.

The Central Park centipede, which lives in the leaves and sticks littering the park, is so unusual that scientists have classified it as the only species in a completely new genus. A species distinguishes a particular type of organism within a broad group, or genus, of organisms that are similar and closely related.

“It’s an exciting thing. It’s always a celebration when you find a new creature on the Earth. It’s pretty interesting finding it in our own backyard,” said Michael Novacek, senior vice president and provost of science at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

“It tells us something shocking about what we don’t know, rather than what we know. There are about 1.5 million species named, but there could be as many as 10-50 million species living on this planet,” Novacek added.

Museum scientists found about 10 of the centipedes in two different sections of the park that spans 843 acres (337 hectares) in Manhattan in samples taken during the spring, summer, fall and winter of 1998. They sent samples to Richard Hoffman, considered the greatest expert on centipedes and millipedes in the United States.

When Hoffman, the curator of invertebrates at the Virginia Museum of Natural History, could not identify them, samples were sent to centipede specialists in Italy, who named the previously unknown species after Hoffman — Nannarrup hoffmani.

“It’s a new genus, and the group that it belongs to comes from Asia, so it’s very strange to find it here. We assume from that it was transported from Asia, but it hasn’t been found there either, and that’s strange,” said Kefyn Catley, a professor at Rutgers University and one of the scientists who worked on the survey.—Reuters