The 40-year-old museum mystery that turned out to be a whole new species

It sat in a University of Tübingen drawer for four decades — a 32.2-centimetre giant deep-sea isopod hauled up off Puerto Rico in the 1980s and filed away as something else. A fresh look by a student researcher and the university's zoology curator found it was no known species at all. Described this month in Scientific Reports as Bathynomus tuebingoborikensis, the armoured creature — roughly the size of a house cat — is a reminder of how much wonder still waits in museum cupboards.