Comments on: The Beauty of Rarity https://deepseanews.com/2019/08/the-beauty-of-rarity/ All the news on the Earth's largest environment. Wed, 07 Aug 2019 18:57:00 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.0 By: Alistair Dove https://deepseanews.com/2019/08/the-beauty-of-rarity/#comment-78401 Wed, 07 Aug 2019 18:57:00 +0000 https://www.deepseanews.com/?p=59136#comment-78401 Beautiful piece Craig. I think sometimes about another kind of rarity, which is phylogenetic uniqueness. My beloved whale sharks are a good example. Not only are their populations declining (and none too big to start with), which is one sort of rareness, but they are the only member of their genus AND the only genus in their family, AND the only pelagic member of their order, and that is rare indeed. I feel the same about coelacanths and tuataras and all the other animal species that exist on their own little separate branches of the great Tree of Life, far removed from other dense clusters of twigs formed by more pedestrian radiations.

Rarity of any of these kinds is a type of beauty, and when a species combines many or even ALL of the classes of rarity, well those are real unicorns aren’t they?

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