If I ever get a tattoo, it's going to be of a praying mantis -- the only insect I'll hold like a pet and one of the few animals besides a dog I'll venture to touch. After a recent Amazon expedition and analysis of old specimens from museum archives, I'll have 19 additional varieties to choose from based on the number of new species discovered by scientists, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Surprisingly, a relatively high number of new species discoveries are made by digging through old museum specimens that were mislabeled or buried in archives. Also surprisingly, research on the famed praying mantis is light, according to lead expeditionary and study author Gavin Svenson, whose work was published in the journal, ZooKeys.

Svenson, an entomologist by trade and a curator at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, traveled through South America, North America and Europe in search of new mantis species -- both in the wild and in the countries' museums. He returned with hundreds of samples, and 19 new species.

One species found in central and South America, bark mantises (of which Svenson found several different varieties), didn't prescribe to their kind's typical mode of behavior. Instead of a green-coating, they were brown. Rather than waiting for their prey as most mantises do, they chased it down. Bark mantises, Svenson found, were also capable of playing dead to avoid predators.

"For an insect, that's pretty complicated," Svenson said in a press release. "I don't think most people would think an insect would play dead. You can literally find this thing in the leaf litter and poke it and it'll just lay there."

That Svenson could identify nearly 20 new species in a single study probably means there are more out there.

"Who knows? I probably missed the 20th new species because they're so difficult to catch sometimes," Svenson said. "It's easy to miss stuff. You're searching through specimen archives that have been there for a long, long time. You don't know exactly what you're going to find."

The new species discovered after rectifying inaccurately labeled specimens might also be extinct, Svenson conceded.