Academia always seems so mature and serious from outside, nice to know there can be some lighthearted humor there too :)
As an aside, do you guys know any other Latin animal names that may have an 'untraditional' origin?
https://www.gadgette.com/2016/02/29/these-are-the-silliest-s... mentions, for example, Pieza pi and Spongiforma squarepantsii.
Google easily gives you more examples, for example https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-worlds-str..., which explains the rules are not very strict: “The name must not be offensive, must be spelled in only the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet and may be derived from any language. In fact, a name need not be derived from anything at all; the rules state that an arbitrary combination of letters is also perfectly acceptable.”
To be honest, I always suspected this.
edit: heh, you could code some nematode's dna sequence into its name.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_hedgehog
The oddest thing was sitting through neuro lectures when this was introduced as if it was the most normal name in the world. We were looking at each other like "are we hearing this right?"
Imaging being told by a doctor that you have sonic the hedgehog disorder.
Named after the game Factorio, as the species was discovered by the father of the lead dev.
The Puerto Rican tody - a small, colorful bird - has the scientific name of todus mexicanus, even though it's endemic to Puerto Rico (where it's known simply as San Pedrito). Meanwhile, the todus portoricensis is actually a Cuban bird.
René Lesson, a French ornithologist, described the birds in 1838, based on information he received from his brother, who had collected some of the species and erroneously noted their provenance. AFAIK, there have been attempts to correct these entrenched errors, but there has been no success in doing so. To further confuse things, there are Puerto Ricans who will refer to the island bird as the todus portoricensis - perhaps as a way of correcting for the error, or just due to the confusion surrounding it.
When Marco Polo got to China, they had some plants & animals that had never been seen back in Europe.
When Western botanists followed over the next few centuries, they brought back specimens. Especially medicinal plants before there were drug companies anyway. It would seem there might be something worthwhile about a material which made it into a pharmacopiea over a period of millennia.
Eventually people started trying to give every different thing a different latin name, and when Linneaus got around to Chinese ginseng he dubbed it Panax Ginseng, simply preceding the Chinese name with panacea-derived "Panax" to classify the genus itself as the most highly regarded in the Far East for treating the widest variety of conditions. This must have also been considered relative to all the other plants that were known to the West for millennia themselves.
American ginseng, known to the natives for millennia on that continent, became Panax Quinquefolius.
Literally _plant with five leaves that can cure many things_.
Psephophorus Terrypratchetti.
I'll add another: Gollumjapyx smeagol
For example, many terms in finance are satire with a thin veneer of seriousness and professional candor in the name.
Its a game of how long can you keep a straight face when you make up the name quantitative easing. Or when you make a derivative called DOOMs to market as an alternative to Credit Default Swaps, and do studies on payout when the company being bet on defaults.
"It was the unique dense golden hairs on the fly's abdomen that led me to name this fly in honour of the performer Beyonce as well as giving me the chance to demonstrate the fun side of taxonomy - the naming of species," Mr Lessard said.
https://www.nme.com/news/music/frank-zappa-3-1234673
https://www.ultimate-guitar.com/articles/features/7_animals_...
The scientist had a dog called "Teco", and he stepped on him by accident. In Portuguese, "pisei no Teco".
[1] Forget Twitter, when it comes to species literally "discovered on the internet" I don't think you can top this one. In 2005 or so, specimens of a beautiful and striking sea urchin test, in the genus Coelopleurus, started cropping up on eBay as collectors' items. They were eventually confirmed as a new species. No, they were not named after eBay (the eventual choice of species epithet, 'exquisitus', was entirely fitting), but their status as the first new species determined directly from eBay specimens is pretty interesting, especially in bioconservation terms.
[2] Spongiforma squarepantsii is a fungus described in 2011. If you've ever eaten a bolete (a cep, or porcini, in foodie speak), then you'll know there are mushrooms where the gills are replaced with a spongey layer of tightly-packed tubes. In its extremely wet habitat, S. squarepantsii has become specialized from bolete ancestors to disperse its spores locally, by rainwater or animal transport, rather than by air, and so the entire fruiting body is reduced to a mass of convoluted sponge. From the Wiki article: "The surface of the fruit body has deep ridges and folds somewhat resembling a brain. It is sponge-like and rubbery — if water is squeezed out, it will resume its original shape... when viewed with scanning electron microscopy, [the spore producing-tissue] somewhat resembles a seafloor covered with tube sponges, reminiscent of the fictitious home of SpongeBob... Although the epithet was originally rejected by the editors of Mycologia as "frivolous", Desjardin and colleagues insisted that "we could name it whatever we liked"."
[3] In Borneo the other year I photographed a large, very hairy spider with bright red fangs that turned out to be a male color morph of a species named in 2008 as Heteropoda davidbowie. The linked Nat Geo article has more examples like that.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2006/aug/17/uknews.taxon...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spongiforma_squarepantsii
[3] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/10/explore-...