Chinchilla actually came before alpaca and llama.

Every new variation of model gets some new name, just like every library gets a new name. There were all kinds of BERTs before - DistilBert, Roberta, SciBERT, Schmobert, Schmuber, etc. Many hundreds of them, I think.

The term "chinchilla" predates llama/alpaca. It doesn't directly map to a specific model, rather a family of compute-optimal models.

As mentioned, chinchilla is not part of this trend, and chinchillas are rodents. Alpacas and llamas are South American camelids (animals related to camels). So if additional names are needed, I would expect them to be vicuña and guanaco, as they are also in the group.

Chinchilla actually came first!