A new species of seahorse discovered

clipped from www.dailymail.co.uk A new species of seahorse has been discovered – more than ten years after the tiny specimen was put on display in a museum. The creature was caught in 1995 in waters off south-western Australia and taken to a local museum. But it went unnoticed until 2006 when a staff member realised it was unusual. Ralph Foster examined it closely and after performing a CT scan concluded it was a type of seahorse previously unknown to science. The creature, which is just a few millimetres long,  is unlike any other variety because it doesn’t have a dorsal fin. It has been named Hippocampus paradoxus. The name paradoxus was chosen because of its meaning – strange and contrary to all expectation. Mr Foster, the collections manager at the South Australian Museum in Adelaide, said: ‘We know very little about this weird little beast.  There are currently about 230,000 known species of sea creature, but scientists estimate that is less than 30 per cent of the number that actually exist.