Trying to identify a new species of animal isn’t the easiest task in the world, but the lucky people who do manage to find one appear to have quite the sense of humor when it comes to giving them a scientific name.
Here are some of our favorites.
Gelae fish
Fun fact: Gelae fish isn’t actually a fish, or a jellyfish. It’s a small, round fungus beetle and belongs to a genus first described in 2004, alongside the equally amusingly named Gelae bean, Gelae belae, Gelae donut, and Gelae rol.
Rather than meaning something in Latin like a lot of scientific names, the entomologists who named G. fish described its moniker as “a whimsical arrangement of letters that is pronounced like the English word, ‘’fish’”. Just in case you were calling it f-eye-sh or something.
The Mini frogs
Scientists adopted a similar level of whimsy when it came to classifying three new species of frogs, because what do you do when tasked with naming tiny animals? Give them tiny size-related names, of course.
And so, in 2019, the genus Mini was born, with its member species Mini ature, Mini mum, and Mini scule. Found in the lowland forests of southern Madagascar, these diddy frogs live up to their little names; male members of M. mum are just 9.7 millimeters long. That makes it one of the smallest known frogs in the world, although it’s not the smallest.
Vini vidivici
RIP Vinividi vici, you would’ve loved Julius Caesar.
The list of silly scientific names is pretty entomology-heavy, but occasionally other animals get a look-in too – although in the case of the extinct conquered lorikeet, the sense of humor applied is somewhat darker.
Only known through fossils found on Polynesian islands, this parrot’s species name alludes to the Latin phrase veni, vidi, vici as it is thought to have gone extinct at the hands of humans 700 to 1,300 years ago.
“The meaning, “I came, I saw, I conquered,” may be projected into the prehistoric situation in the Marquesas and elsewhere in Polynesia, where people came to an island, saw the native parrots, and then conquered them, leaving behind only the bones,” wrote the scientists who named this unfortunate lorikeet.
Aha ha
Nope, I didn’t accidentally put my reply to my colleague’s funny Teams message here – Aha ha is actually a species of wasp endemic to Australia.
It was named by US entomologist Arnold S. Menke, who recalled how the name came about in a 1983 issue of wasp biology publication, Sphecos.
“My recollection is that while going over some sphecid material collected “down under” by [fellow entomologists Howard E. Evans and Bob Matthews], I came upon a cute little gray wasp with strange tarsal ungues and exclaimed, ‘aha, a new genus’. Eric Grissell, resident wit, who happened to be standing nearby observing the master, retorted with some skepticism, ‘ha’.”
And thus, the funniest wasp species was born.
Agra vation
We can thank entomologist Terry Erwin for another fantastically silly beetle name. A species of Carabidae or ground beetle, Agra vation isn’t particularly aggravating in itself, but apparently collecting samples of the Agra genus is something of a painstaking task, hence the name.
Erwin is also responsible for a number of other humorous names within this genus, including Agra cadabra and Agra katewinsletae after Titanic actress Kate Winslet. “Her character did not go down with the ship, but we will not be able to say the same for this elegant canopy species, if all the rain forest is converted to pastures,” wrote Erwin in the study describing the species.
Source Link: 7 Animals With Some Of The Silliest Scientific Names
