Zoological Survey of India Scientists Described Three New Rhysida Centipede Species From Kerala and Coorg, Published Online on 12 October 2026

On 12 October 2026 the International Journal of Tropical Insect Science published the descriptions of three centipede species new to science, found in Kerala and Karnataka. The authors are Neisseril Anirudhan Kashmeera and Pavittu Meethal Sureshan of the Zoological Survey of India’s Western Ghat Regional Centre in Kozhikode, and Melethalakkal Fathima-Nourin of Malabar Christian College, also in Kozhikode. The species are Rhysida quadrispinosa, Rhysida coorgensis and Rhysida neyyarensis, and none of the three had a scientific name before.

What the paper reports

The paper is titled “Discovery of three new species of the genus Rhysida Wood, 1862 (Chilopoda: Scolopendromorpha), from Southern India.” Chilopoda is the class of centipedes, and Scolopendromorpha is one of its orders. Springer’s record shows the manuscript was received on 26 March 2025, accepted on 26 September 2026 and published online on 12 October 2026. The authors state that the work received no external funding.

The abstract places the three species as follows: R. quadrispinosa from Kozhikode, Kerala; R. coorgensis from Coorg, Karnataka; and R. neyyarensis from Neyyar, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala. The paper also includes a distribution map of the Indian species of the genus.

How the three are told apart

A new centipede species is separated from its relatives by small, countable features, and the abstract names one for each.

R. quadrispinosa carries four ventrolateral spines on the prefemur of its ultimate leg. In plain terms, that is four spines on the underside and outer edge of a segment of the last pair of legs, which is also where the species gets its name. Down To Earth reports that the shape of the edges of some body segments and the arrangement of spines on the hind legs help set it apart as well.

R. coorgensis resembles a species called R. ikhalama. It differs in the number of coxopleural spines, which Down To Earth describes as spines near the rear of the body.

R. neyyarensis resembles R. konda and R. pazhuthara. It can be separated by how the spurs are distributed on two leg segments, the tarsus and the tibia.

The paper’s reference list includes ChiloBase 2.0, a world catalogue of centipedes. Down To Earth reports that the team examined the animals under microscopes with digital cameras, compared them with known species and checked global databases including ChiloBase, and that the specimens were previously unidentified centipedes held in the Zoological Survey of India’s National Zoological Collection. The Zoological Survey, founded on 1 July 1916 and headquartered in Kolkata, traces its origins to the zoology department of the Indian Museum in Calcutta in 1875.

Two Kerala species and one from Coorg

Both Down To Earth and GKToday report that R. neyyarensis is named for the Neyyar Wildlife Sanctuary in Kerala, and that R. coorgensis is named for Coorg. Kerala Tourism describes Neyyar as a forested hill sanctuary of about 12,000 hectares in the southeast of the Western Ghats, run by the Thiruvananthapuram Wildlife Division and rising to the Agasthyarkoodam peak, about 1,890 metres high.

UNESCO’s World Heritage statement for the Western Ghats gives the range as roughly 140,000 square km over a 1,600 km stretch, with only the 30 km Palghat Gap breaking it. The same statement says the range is one of the world’s eight “hottest hotspots” of biological diversity, together with Sri Lanka, and that “Invertebrate biodiversity, once better known, is likely also to be very high.” The paper adds three invertebrate species to the record of the range. For the range itself, see the tuput guide to the Western Ghats World Heritage Site; for a Kerala forest of a different kind, see Silent Valley.

The same team’s earlier record work

The Kozhikode group published related work in December 2025. In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, India Section B, Kashmeera, Karthika, Anjana and Sureshan reported five new state records of scolopendrid centipedes: Rhysida crassispina, R. lewisi, Scolopendra ellorensis and S. indiae from Kerala, and R. aspinosa from Karnataka, each for the first time. The paper’s abstract says that India has four biodiversity hotspots and that many groups, centipedes among them, lack complete assessments of where they live, and that the available data are fragmented. Sureshan, a co-author of both papers, also wrote the centipede chapter in the Zoological Survey’s 2020 volume on the fauna of the Western Ghats, which the new paper cites.

A genus with deep roots on the subcontinent

Rhysida has drawn attention beyond India. In a 2019 paper in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, Jahnavi Joshi, Praveen Karanth and Gregory Edgecombe used DNA, body structure and distribution data to study the genus across the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia. They named five new species, among them R. ikhalama, R. konda and R. pazhuthara, the three that the 2026 paper uses as points of comparison. Their abstract reports that Southeast Asian species sit inside clades of Indian-subcontinent species, which they read as support for the out-of-India hypothesis, and that both major groups of the genus began to diversify on the subcontinent in the Cretaceous period. They also conclude that diversity of the genus in India had been underestimated.

Where the reports differ

The sources disagree on two points, and the paper is the better guide on both.

The first is the count. The abstract in the journal says the three descriptions expand the Indian Rhysida fauna to 20 species. Down To Earth and GKToday both report that the total is now 23, and neither explains the gap. This article uses the abstract’s figure of 20 where it gives a total and notes that the news reports say 23.

The second is the date. Springer’s record gives 12 October 2026 as the online publication date, which Down To Earth also uses. GKToday, in a report dated 17 October, says the species were described on 16 October. The full text of the paper sits behind a subscription, so this article relies on the abstract and the publication record for the paper’s claims and on the two news reports for the details attributed to them.