I used to often go through lists, google searches, and so on looking for funny/weird animal names. I have made quite a few lists already, and I thought I would make a post here to see if some of you know some good ones. plants and fungi also welcome :) Here are some of my favorites that I can fin…

Unequal Cellophane Bee (Colletes inaequalis)

Bone-eating snotflower (Osedax mucofloris). It’s a worm, not a flower.

I looked up “katydid” in Wiktionary and found “hepokatti” in Finnish. “Hepo” is “horse”; none of the others had anything I recognized as “horse”, so I clicked on it and found it means “horsecat”. The German for “turtle” is “Schildkröte”, which means “shieldtoad”.

Here’s what I’ve found on iNat: ‘Satanic leaf-tailed gecko’ ‘Paradoxical Swimming Frog’ ‘Tawny crazy ant’ ‘Pleasing fungus beetles’ (this one is a family) I’ve been looking for some time for these names in iNat (randomly searching for animals and words that would sound weird in a animal’s name)

Titmouse. A bird. Who in their right mind names a bird this. The answer…some random 16 year old.

One of our local grasshoppers is a Northern Ungee-gungee. Wish I knew what the translation is.

Noolbenger and wambenger. What are nool and wam and how do you beng them? Confused flour beetle. Confused is not the beetle’s state of mind; it’s called that because it’s easy to confuse it with another species.

Clearly it should have been Confusing Flour Beetle, to go along with Pleasing Fungus Beetle. Even so, a pretty ridiculous name!

Another is sad ground crab spider

Funny, long, or just plain weird animal names

Nature Talk

raymie November 12, 2024, 1:40am 611

Wait until you find about the genus Parus…

(In actuality the names of these birds pre-date the usage of the word you’re thinking of ;) )

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Funny, long, or just plain weird animal names

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