A conglomerate of Canadian and Spanish researchers have discovered new marine life, which have been previously unknown to the scientific community, and some are even over a 1,000 years old. They are hoping that these creatures will shed some light into the secrets of the ancient underwater ecosystems.

This is an absolutely amazing development.. Even though the Gulf of Mexico is in turmoil, what with the BP oil spill gumming up the works, it appears that life does go on, as scientists revealed on Thursday that a new species of pancake batfish have been discovered there.

Newly investigated fossils show that a type of filter-feeding fishes that aren’t closely related to today’s whales (who, of course, are mammals and not fishes) roamed the oceans during the Mesozoic Era some 170 million years ago. Previously the whales were believed to have been the first large filter feeders, but these new fossils tell a different story.

Residents of the Daluo village in China’s Guangxi province have caught several weird looking yellow fishes in a cave lake located 1,000 meters (3,280 feet) below ground.

Four new species of King crab has been discovered in the Smithsonian Collections of the National Museum of Natural History in Washington.

For the first time since 1947, a new species of cartilaginous fish has been described from Californian waters. The new species – Hydrolagus melanophasma – belongs to a group of sharks known as Chimaeras or ghostsharks.

When a six-foot-long gelatinous animal turned up off Brazil’s Bahia cost, initial accounts quoted scientists calling the creature “completely new, scientifically speaking.” However, fish experts taking a closer look at the video footage have now managed to identify it as being a member of Ateleopodidae, an elusive family of deep-sea fish known as jellynoses or tadpole fish.

For anyone interested in learning more about the fascinating creatures inhabiting the deep and chilly waters of the Canadian Basin, details of a 2005 research mission has now been published in the journal Deep Sea Research Part II.

A previously unknown species of crustacean and two previously unknown species of annelid worms have been discovered during a cave dive near Lanzarote in the Canary Islands off the coast of northern Africa.

A new species of wrasse living off the Brazilian coast has been described by Osmar Luiz, Jr, Carlos Ferreira and Luiz Rocha. The new species has been named Halichoeres sazimai after Brazilian ichthyologist Ivan Sazima from Universidade Estadual de Campinas in São Paolo.

U.S. researchers John F. Switzer* and Robert M. Wood** have described a new species of darter from the Meramec River drainage of Missouri, USA. The new species has been named Etheostoma erythrozonum and is the first known fish species endemic to the Meramec River drainage. Its common name is Meramec Saddled Darter.

Brachypopomus gauderio is not the only electric knifefish recently described from South America, U.S. researchers John P. Sullivan* and Carl D. Hopkins** have described another member of the genus Brachyhypopomus and given it the name Brachyhypopomus bullocki.

Brazilian ichthyologists Julia Giora and Luiz Malabarba have described a new species of electric knifefish and named it Brachypopomus gauderio.

A group of conservationists and scientists are planning a research trip to the world’s largest rubbish pile; the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Also known as the Eastern Garbage Patch, the Pacific Trash Vortex, or simply the Great Plastic Vortex; this gyre of marine litter has been gradually building over the last 60 years but we still know very little of this man-made monstrosity.

The Top 10 list of new species from 2008 has now been compiled by the ASU institute and an international committee of taxonomists. Last year, thousands of new species were described by science, many of them native to hard-to-access regions of our planet, such as remote tropical areas or deep sea habitats, but two of the species on the list actually hail from much less exotic locations: Cardiff and a bottle of hairspray.