First amphibious centipede

The world's first-known amphibious centipede is Scolopendra cataracta, which was formally described and named as recently as May 2016, in the scientific journal ZooKeys. Native to southeast Asia and measuring up to 20 cm in length, this large, venomous, carnivorous species was discovered by Dr George Beccaloni from London's Natural History Museum while on honeymoon in Thailand in 2001 when he turned over a rock beside a stream and found it underneath. Instead of running away on land like other centipedes would have done, it dived into the stream, and when he successfully captured it he discovered that – unlike all previously known centipedes – it could swim powerfully like an eel, via horizontal undulations of its body. Moreover, when it was taken out of water, the water rolled off its body, leaving it totally dry, thereby confirming that it was adapted for an amphibious existence.

Currently, only four specimens of this remarkable new species are known to science. One is the Thai specimen collected in 2001 by Dr Beccaloni; two others were collected near waterfalls in Laos by one of Beccaloni's NHM colleagues, Dr Gregory Edgecombe, and a Thai student, Warut Siriwut; and the fourth had been collected in Vietnam back in 1928 and had been in the NHM's collections ever since but had been misidentified as a more common, non-amphibious species.