New small, neon fish species discovered
Sept. 25 (UPI) -- Scientists aren't sure how a fish this brightly colored went undiscovered for so long. But it did. Tosanoides aphrodite, a new coral fish species, was described for the first time this week in the journal ZooKeys. Scientists discovered the neon species among the reefs of St. Paul's Rocks, an archipelago off the coast of Brazil. Perhaps it is the species' remote home in the middle of the equatorial Atlantic that made the fish so elusive. But once scientists spotted the bright pink, yellow and green fish, they couldn't look away. "This is one of the most beautiful fishes I've ever seen," Luiz Rocha, curator of fishes at the California Academy of Sciences, said in a news release. "It was so enchanting it made us ignore everything around it." Genetic analysis confirmed the ...