A person using a smartphone to document a snake on a road. Since iNaturalist was founded in 2008, observations submitted to the platform have been incorporated into more than 5,000 peer-reviewed papers. — Frederick Kundert via The New York Times
In spring 2019, a nature photographer hiking in the mountains of northern China snapped an image of an unusual insect: a fly that appeared to be disguised as a bumblebee, down to its fuzzy black-and-yellow stripes.
The photographer uploaded the image to iNaturalist, a citizen science platform, where it attracted the attention of an entomologist. The following year, the entomologist published a paper describing the bumblebee mimic as a new species, now known as the mountain ghost stiletto fly.
