Two new scorpion species were legally recognised in the Golden State on Monday by a study that was published in the journal Zookeys.
The scorpions, which are small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, were discovered in the dried-up lake beds of Koehn Lake in the Mojave Desert and Soda Lake in Central California.
After the lake where it was discovered, one of the scorpion species was given the name Paruroctonus conclusus, while the other was given the name Paruroctonus soda.
The scorpions P. soda and P. conclusus can only be found in the lakebeds of Soda Lake and Koehn Lake because they have evolved so specifically to those environments.
The California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society collaborated to create the community science platform known as iNaturalist.
Forbes and Jain discovered two unidentified scorpion species while examining thousands of observations posted by other iNaturalist users
The species that would ultimately be identified as P. conclusis was the first one that Forbes and Jain learned about.
They first discovered one of those species in 2019, thanks to an observation made at Koehn Lake and posted to iNaturalist.
"We discovered we were looking at an undescribed Paruroctonus species when we went back to that initial observation," he continued.
After an observation of the then-unknown species was submitted to iNaturalist, the second scorpion species, eventually recognised as P. soda, was found.
After that, Jain and Forbes collaborated with Lauren Esposito, curator of arachnology at the California Academy of Sciences, to determine the species.