what is the best thing you have discovered?

Question: what is the best thing you have discovered?
- Keywords:
  discover,
  discovery
Asked by yangtze5 to Adam, Emily, Thad, Thomas on 10 Mar 2015. This question was also asked by 284evnb33, 464evnb42.
- Adam Milligan answered on 10 Mar 2015:
  
  I have been part of a team that discovered new species (types) of moths and once found a species of snake that was HUNDREDS of miles from where it should have been but the absolute best thing was finding 2,000 year old cave paintings!
  
  I was following baboons in South Africa for a study I was doing there and when really heavy rain came on I hid in a cave and found the paintings! They had never been noticed before so I felt pretty special.
- Thomas Clements answered on 10 Mar 2015:
  
  hi yangtze5,
  
  Tough question. I recently discovered some microscopic ‘organelles’ called melanosomes in the eye of a 300 million year old fossil amphibian.
  
  That may sound really confusing but melanosomes are tiny structures inside a cell that contain a pigment known as menanin. The size and shape of the melanosomes is what gives your hair and skin their colour. There are long sausage shape ones, that create a black colour, and round ones that give a reddish colour. You can also have a mix of the two for all the other hair colours. Also, if you have blonde hair (like me) then you have less melanosomes. As you get older and your hair goes white, that is because your hair follicle is no longer producing melanosomes.
  
  By finding these structures in a fossil eye, we know they had pigment so they had dark coloured eyes like modern amphibians. Other recent work suggests these animals could see in the dark – so they were likely to be nocturnal predators. Not bad information to get out of 300 million year old rock!
  
  if you’d like to learn more about pigment and how it’s synthesised by the body, check out this webpage: http://palaeo.gly.bris.ac.uk/melanosomes/melanin.html
- anon answered on 11 Mar 2015:
  
  I love discovering things that help me to work out new ways to protect wildlife. So one of the best things I’ve worked on was researching a particular frog species called the northern red legged frog or Rana aurora. It is one of the species of ‘Special Concern’ listed as part of Canada’s Species at Risk Act. That’s a way of saying that a species is at risk of becoming endangered or even lost from an area, often because humans are damaging the habitat the species live in (through things like deforestation).
  
  I was collecting more information about the places that the frogs were choosing to lay their eggs, and the information I collected has helped conservation groups to protect particular important areas and restore areas that were being spoiled. It’s so exciting to know that work that you’ve done will help animals to be better protected in the future!
  
  While I was working on the frogs I also found a very rare species of flower in a place that no-one had ever recorded it before. The feeling of finding something totally new is magical, it’s like a little secret between you and nature and it is really fun sharing that discovery and surprise with other people!
- Thaddeus Aid answered on 11 Mar 2015:
  
  What I do is I look for mutations in humans that are beneficial to the human that has it. I have discovered a number of beneficial mutations (we are still trying to figure out what they do) but the best thing is that the method I have developed may turn out to be the most powerful method for detecting beneficial mutations yet built.

Question: what is the best thing you have discovered?

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