THEY say you can get anything on eBay. Now it seems you can even discover a new marine species.

Sea urchin shells and spines are popular collectors’ items on eBay, but buyers began to get confused when the shells they received didn’t look like anything else in their collections. “Every week I’d get collectors contacting me and asking me to identify the species,” says Simon Coppard at the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature in London. When he and colleague Heinke Schultze, an independent researcher, compared similar unidentified specimens from New Caledonia in the South Pacific with species records, they found nothing matched. Instead, they realised that …