How do scientists come up with names for animals?

Nature Talk
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I would like to defend capensis, in geography, since that is for our floral kingdom. Altho there is at least one lost capensis in the USA.

Which one was that? I think there are a couple, though I assume you’re talking about jewelweed (Impatiens capensis)? But if that’s the case it’s likely that the species was named for a cape in North America like Cape Cod and was subsequently found to occur elsewhere. This is why “name-and-place” taxonomy sometimes doesn’t work out. A good example of this is the white-tailed deer, Odocoileus virginianus. The species was named for the holotype coming from the English Virginia colony and what is now the state of Virginia, however the species is also naturally found in every state of the United States except Alaska and Hawaii, most Canadian provinces except Nunavut and Newfoundland, every Central American country, and then every South American country except the four in the Southern Cone (Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile). As a result “virginianus” becomes a bit misleading.

For extra weird points, the genus name Odocoileus (“hollow tooth”) comes from a fossil deciduous tooth that came from a Pleistocene cave in Pennsylvania. The describer, Rafinesque, misidentified the deciduous tooth as a permanent tooth. The tooth was hollow due to the roots being partially resorbed (at least this is what I heard), so he didn’t realize it belonged to a juvenile white-tailed deer and named it as a new taxon. Odocoileus ended up being the oldest valid genus name available for the small North American deer when it got split off from Cervus. So Odocoileus is technically a Lazarus taxon!

In terms of iNaturalist, I’ve noticed an issue where a lot of plant observations often go unidentified because many zoologists or zoology-focused amateurs can’t tell plants apart, or aren’t even tagged as plants in the first place! Seriously, check out the “Unknown” category, it’s mostly untagged plant observations with some fungi. The issue being that plant taxonomy probably isn’t as well known, and the primary ways in which most individuals are taught to percieve the botanical world (“flower”, “tree”, “shrub”, “ground cover”, “weed”, etc.) don’t reflect taxonomic reality (there are “trees” in Cycadophyta, Pteridophyta, “Gymnospermae”, and Angiospermae, with additional extinct examples in Lycopodiophyta, to name one example). I’d even admit that I end up tagging a lot of my plant observations as “Angiospermae” unless they’re a really distinctive species, because even though I have taken taxonomy courses that went over the major divisions of plants, the course didn’t go into detail as to how to tell angiosperms apart (we went over dicots versus monocots, and that was it due to time constraints).

It’s unfortunate that botanists and zoologists don’t communicate. I wonder how many obs are trapped at life 'cos its some plant, but not a fish etc.

To be honest, zoologists usually don’t even communicate with other zoologists! There was an issue several years ago where a group of entomologists found the dinosaur Syntarsus was proccupied by a beetle. They coined a new name Megapnosaurus for the dinosaur, which means “big, dead lizard”. This name was problematic for many reasons…

  1. ICZN rules state that if someone discovers a name is preoccupied, standard practice is to contact the original author and give them first dibs at renaming the taxon. The entomologists barely bothered to find out if the original author was alive, only asking one person who barely knew the author’s location, which was all the more noteworthy given he was currently fleeing from Mugabe-era Zimbabwe at the time and thus was between addresses for obvious reasons. However, the original describer was a well-known member of several paleontological societies, and all of them had his up-to-date contact information and could easily have provided it to the entomologists upon request. I.e., the authors didn’t make a good-faith attempt to contact the original author.
  2. The name violates the rule I mentioned in my earlier post about names not supposed to be derogatory. Not only did the paleontology community take it as an insult, but the entomologists who named it appeared to intend for it to be taken as an insult, given they said their motivation for the name was to make paleontologists to, in their own words, “get a sense of perspective”, as well as being derogatory to the work of the original describer. When paleontologists pointed out that this action was rather rude and unprofessional, the response from the entomologists was basically “what are you going to do about it”.

However, if there had been just a little bit better communication between the two groups, this whole issue could have been moot (and each accused the other of “you don’t understand what the proper protocol is for our area of biology”).

And to be honest, this issue isn’t even rare in biology. The entomologists I’ve met have either tended to be extremely nice or have a massive inferiority-superiority complex where they consider all other fields of biology beneath them, with no middle ground. When talking to these colleagues to try to figure out why they feel this way, the perceived impression was that their beliefs stemmed from a sense of resentment that insect taxonomy is not as popular as vertebrate biology, paleontology, or even ecology or freshwater and marine biology among the public (given that they were very unsubtle about this point), despite they themselves personally considering entomology to be more important. I remember taking an entomology course where the lecturer consistently had nothing positive to say about those who studied any other group of organisms and their field, and who used his position as a platform to bad-mouth the fields of study of every non-entomologist student in his class.

And paleontology has their own issues with elitism and self-importance, to the point that other disciplines in biology point and laugh at their practices and what they call a lack of rigor and a tendency towards spectacular claims with little scientific support, especially the dinosaur and hominin ones. Paleontology also has a persistent issue where research in certain groups is systematically ignored because of long-standing prejudices that the group isn’t important evolutionarily because it represents a “primitive” or “archaic” “dead-end” or happens to be a group that doesn’t have a strong representation in the global north. This is especially bad in mammals, where I’ve heard from colleagues who work on extinct mammal groups like hyaenodonts or notoungulates (as opposed to, say, horses, carnivorans, or elephants) that almost no one shows up to their talks at major meetings or reads their literature. I’ve seen mammalian paleontologists fail to use the most up-to-date taxonomy and systematics for these “primitive” groups (and by “fail”, I mean the taxonomy was outdated 30 years ago), despite these researchers being mammal specialists themselves!

The point I’m trying to make with all this shop talk is to demonstrate just how little communication happens between different groups of taxonomists, and that a lot of this lack of communication isn’t just due to science becoming ever more insular and compartmentalized as it becomes less and less possible for one person to know everything, but is also due to toxic cultural attitudes that lead biologists to not consider taxa outside their group of study simply because they consider them uninteresting. This isn’t just entomologists and paleontologists, but I’m just highlighting these two given they’re cases I’ve experienced enough with both to use them as case studies. Some of it may be personality as well, given that I’ve noticed a lot of scientists tend to have issues with tunnel-vision, be terrible at understanding other people’s perspectives or why they think the way they do (or convince another to adopt their thought process), and tend to be very uncompromising and confrontational in their stances (the flip side of that is that it is probably because they have these kinds of personalities that these individuals excel in research in the first place). However, the downside of this is that the types of people who tend to become scientists are unlikely to be inspired by other fields of study or regularly communicate with researchers who work on topics outside their immediate bubble. It’s not impossible for researchers to do so, and there are examples of cross-disciplinary collaboration and communication, but the fact that there is currently a crisis over science becoming over-insularized and thus not-exposed to novel ideas highlights how the lack of communication is an issue.

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that. Just that. Is a huge problem because there are so many plants. Birds and animals get IDed smartly. Insects and easy plants fairly promptly. But the plants can languish for years, till the appropriate expert arrives to work thru their swathe.

There are capes all over the world, but ours is the Cape. Capensis applies specifically to our Flora Capensis, a tiny area, dense with many species.

About 9K plant species
https://www.cepf.net/our-work/biodiversity-hotspots/cape-floristic-region/species

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It’s interesting the scientific names that are proposed in the literature that become established but are inaccurate. The White-winged Dove (Zenaida asiatica) is a New World species (and common in my area) that was described from Jamaica and doesn’t occur in Asia. Apparently a little error in translation and confusion about West Indies versus East Indies. But we’re stuck with it. The chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) is not really known to use caves, at least not regularly, so the specific epithet is something of a misnomer. Probably numerous other examples where the scientific name missed the mark in terms of its descriptive accuracy. But that isn’t grounds for replacing the name.

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But not within the same kingdom, i.e because of Dysphania the moth, there cannot be any other animal genus Dysphania – mollusk or bird or whatever.

Although there is the genus Linnaea, which Linnaeus described in a humorously self-deprecating way.

If we applied that to common names, too, it would save a lot of the debate being discussed in other threads.

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How is it self-deprecating?

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According to HW Rickett (1941, in the journal Torreya), Linnaeus himself wrote that the genus “was named by the celebrated Gronovius and is a plant of Lapland, lowly, insignificant, disregarded, flowering but for a brief space – from Linnaeus who resembles it.”

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If we applied that to common names, too, it would save a lot of the debate being discussed in other threads.

To be quite honest, I’ve been counting down the days until someone tries to apply political correctness to formal taxonomic nomenclature as well, given how there’s been such a shift in public discourse from viewing history as “warts and all” to “historical censorship”. There have been a lot of recent attempts to strip achievements from previous scientists because their stances don’t comply with modern moral standards, even if their beliefs were distasteful but typical for academics at the time (e.g., the large number of early 20th century scientists who held eugenic or social Darwinist beliefs back when these were considered trendy topics in “educated” society and not harbingers of mass genocide). Edward Drinker Cope’s name being stripped from Copeia comes to mind, his views were disgusting by present standards but sadly for the time he lived in his views were fairly typical. Posthumously invalidating someone’s legitimately-conducted research because of their political stances seems monstrous (mostly because it’s almost certain that hundreds of years from now someone will find some reason to look at any of us the same way, or that a totalitarian regime could use it as an excuse to diminish the achievements of scientists that are critical of the regime’s ideology or policies, and it sounds eerily like how Egyptian regimes would deface statues and carvings of predecessors they didn’t like), but that seems to be the way people are choosing to go.

I’ve even heard colleagues (well, mostly graduate students and postdocs) say we shouldn’t support scientific ideas like Linnaean binomial nomenclature solely because of Carolus Linnaeus was such an awful person, rather than on any logical or scientific merits. This isn’t unique to Linnaeus, I’ve seen this argument applied to cladistics (the inventor of cladistics, Willi Hennig, was an ardent supporter of Nazi Germany and actually fought in the Wehrmacht as a ranked officer in World War II, though from what other authors have written this seems to have been out of a sense of “hometown” German patriotism typical in early 20th century Europe rather than believing into Nazi ideals) as well, and even some branches of statistics such as Fisher’s methods like p-values (arguing that we shouldn’t use them because Fisher was a bad person, rather than because his methods were flawed). The cardinal rule of studying history is that one should assume that pretty much everyone was a bad human being by present standards, and to borrow a Biblical metaphor one would have a harder time finding a decent human being by modern standards in the past than Lot did trying to find 10 righteous people in Sodom and Gomorrah.

I can even see the argument that would be made for such scientific censorship: "we don’t want to promote or support people with awful ideas, and by using these names we are giving these people historical immortality as well as continuing to posthumously inflate the value of their work through taxonomic citations

To be honest, if we are going to censor formal Linnaean binomials based on the views their describers held the first ones on the chopping block should probably be Tyrannosaurus rex and Velociraptor mongoliensis, specifically because the person who named them, Henry Fairfield Osborn, was probably one of the worst human beings to ever exist. Osborn was just about every bigoted term in the book and then some, being notably racist even for the time and place he lived in (he was an admirer of Hitler and I’ve heard Osborn described as “more racist than the Nazis”), heavily elitist, treated the regular people working under him like garbage (e.g., when he used the elevator at the AMNH he forced lower-ranked employees to vacate the car so he could ride it in alone), would hold grudges over scientific disputes for decades (e.g., refusing to fix the incorrect head on the AMNH Apatosaurus out of pride after it was shown to be wrong), and using his position as director of the AMNH to promote his looney ideas on eugenics and evolution and in the process single-handedly set back public understanding of evolution decades. E.g., the whole meme of evolution proceeding linearly and towards a “goal”, such as in the March of Progress, was largely Osborn’s fault due to how much the exhibits at the AMNH osmosed into the public consciousness. And yet the names he coined are probably two of the top five most commonly known scientific names in the world. The history of science is generally filled with awful people, though I will say that Osborn by far was abnormally bad.

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There’s also Thylacinus cynocephalus, which roughly translates to “dog-headed pouched-dog”. Or Pseudosuchia (“false crocodiles”), one of the competing names for the group of archosaurs composed of crocodilians and their extinct relatives. Mostly because it was once thought that the other members of Pseudosuchia such as aetosaurs and rauisuchians weren’t related to crocodylians, but it turns out crocodilians are deeply nested within that group.

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Two other examples of misleading plant epithets:

  • Lilium pensylvanicum is not related to North America, it is a species from the Far East of Eurasia. An attempt was made to correct this immediately after the publication of the species in 1805. In 1809, the author made an attempt to rename it Lilium dauricum, but the original name remained legal.
  • On the contrary, Paeonia daurica grows thousands of kilometers from Dauria - in Tauria (i.e. Crimea). The erroneous name (since 1807) comes from a misspelling of one letter on the label of the herbarium specimen, which served as a type for the description.
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There are other interesting mistakes that get immortalized in scientific names and can’t be fixed, based on the rules. Certainly a lot of spelling errors, some of which can be emended but others can’t.

A few decades ago, an author wrote and published an identification key to the Aspidoscelis lizards of the U.S. He included in the key a named subspecies that hadn’t yet been formally described and published by another author – I recall that the new name for the lizard had already been used in an unpublished thesis, dissertation, or manuscript. Without meaning to and to his dismay, the author of the key became the original describer of that subspecies (since he included descriptive characteristics in his published key) and his name is now attached to that taxon, despite his attempt to somehow fix the situation. Basically he unintentionally scooped the poor guy who planned to describe it.

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Occasionally, scientists will find out what the locals call a species, and use that as the scientific name.

Example: Ompok bimaculatus: ompok was likely its name in some local language of the area.

Another example: Guazuma ulmifolia: guasuma was the tree’s name in the Taino language, and the variants guasimo or guasima are its common names in Spanish.

In a sense, this is also the way classical names work: Quercus is, in fact, the Classical Latin word for oak. In ancient Rome, it was the common name; now, it is the scientific name.

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Blockquote

rest of the thread snipped for brevity

**
Thank you, this is one of the best written and fun writings I have read on the naming system.

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