Here's a New Year's thought. With some nine million species on the planet, and with each species lasting a million years on average, about nine species will go extinct naturally this coming year (with more, almost certainly, going extinct unnaturally). But about nine new species also will be born in 2012.

Biologists have long dreamed of catching a new species in the act of forming. The problem, of course, is the time scale—and the fact that most species are little-known beetles...