A New Species of Dolphin

Common bottlenose dolphin

On September 14th, the discovery a new species of dolphin, the burrunan dolphin (Tursiops australis) was officially announced. There has already been a fair bit of coverage of this in the media (see, for example, the BBC story), but I want to focus here on how this all came about. How exactly do you go about naming a new species?

In theory, it's a fairly straightforward, if somewhat laborious, process. You find your new species, write up a description of what it looks like, and how to tell it apart from similar species, designate a holotype (more on this later), think up a name, and get it published. Leaving aside the difficulty of the first part of that - "first, find your new species" - that's often all there is to it. But, with dolphins, the story has been rather more complicated than that.

First, let's get our bearings. The sort of dolphin we're talking about here is a bottlenose dolphin, a particularly well known type, and commonly seen in sea mammal parks, where they have been trained to perform a number of tricks. They live in every ocean, avoiding only the very coldest of polar seas and are therefore extremely widespread.