My reputation as an invertebrate zoologist with an individual sense of humour has preceded me among the regulars here, but one glaring omission from my output, has been the absence of any mention of a certain taxonomic website that is one of my more frequent haunts, whenever I’m looking for humour lurking within the world of scientific nomenclature. I am now correcting that omission, and hereby introduce everyone to:
Curiosities of Biological Nomenclature.
Here you will find all manner of strange taxonomic names, involving organisms that had the misfortune to be named after people they would probably have run a mile from, organisms that ended up being linked to Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, and organisms whose names involve a fair bit of ribaldry.
From a Genus of flowers (and a species of earwig) named after a certain part of the female anatomy, to a moth named after a certain orange person (the reasons cited in the paper were the yellow head fluff and the diminutive genitalia), there’s something for everyone here, including the sometimes wacky sense of humour that was deployed during the naming of various Drosophila genes. I’ll let you find out the lateral thinking behind some of those names for yourselves.
Oh, and when you visit that site, don’t forget to look up the fun and games involved in the names chosen for moths belonging to the Genus Catocala. This became a feature of a book in my collection, namely The Scientific Names of the British Lepidoptera, by Colonel A. Maitland Emmet (funny how many British army officers became involved in the world of Lepidoptera, but I digress).
The website mentions the associations with, er, acts of horizontal passion, but fails to mention how these names originated. Emmet comes to the rescue here, and informs us that when Linnaeus named the first three species in the Genus, which possess bright red patches of colour on the hindwings, it was the custom in his native Sweden for a bride to wear a red petticoat on her wedding night. Emmet ponders the possibility that Linnaeus was gazing at some nubile young maiden while working on the taxonomy of these moths.
That trend has continued into more recent work on these moths, so that now, we have various North American species in the Genus, boasting such names as the Girlfriend Underwing (C. amica), the Sweetheart Underwing (C. amatrix) and the Darling Underwing (Catocala cara). There’s also a brace of these moths named after various literary and mythological temptresses - C. desdemona, C. delilah and Catocala miranda being foremost among these.
One omission from the set, however, is Dionomys branickii. For those unaware of this interesting mammal, the scientific name translates from the Greek as “Count Branicki’s Terrible Mouse”. A nicely Pythonesque name to round off this introduction.