If you found a new species, what would it be and what would you name it?

Nature Talk
1

If I found a new species, it’d be a lizard, and I’d call it catus retinus, Cat’s Eye Lizard.

2

i like descriptive or locality-based names, so it depends!

3

Insect. Probably ant.

4

You’d name a new species ant?

5

There are rules about what names you can use for species, and it seems that Catus retinus is disallowed. Catus (Fritzinger 1861) is a junior synonym of Felis (Linnaeus 1758). If I understand the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature correctly (I’m more familiar with the ICNafp) this means that Catus cannot be used for this or any other animal taxon.

Even if Catus was available I suspect that you would have difficulty getting it through peer review.

  • peer reviewers would be likely to push back against using a name meaning “cat” for a lizard genus.
  • If you beat them down on the point, you still have to convince them that the new species is generically distinct from all known lizard species. If it’s congeneric with another species you have to use the pre-existing genus name.
  • retina is a noun, and if used as a species epithet is a noun in apposition, not an adjective in the nominative case, and therefore doesn’t show gender agreement. So it should be Catus retina, not Catus retinus. But the latter might slip past peer review if the reviewer is not au fait with Latin, and zoological nomenclature tends to stick with the original orthography, unlike botanical nomenclature where grammatical errors are usually corrected.
  • retina seems to mean “retina”, not “eye”. This takes me to cat’s-eye lizard being Lacerta (replace genus as appropriate) oculus-cati.
  • but there’s yet another issue. catus is not a Classical Latin word for “cat”. It is an adjective meaning clever or shrewd. It is not until Vulgar Latin that cattus or catus is adopted for the domestic cat. Since zoological nomenclature uses Late Latin (Medieval and post-Medieval) it seems that oculus-cati is acceptable, but there is the alternative of oculus-felis.

So you can see that naming species is more complicated than might be first thought.

6

Your advice really helps, but I’m not serious. I’m not going to actually name a new species catus retinus if I find one. (If)

7

But catus retina, or oculus-cati sounds good to.

8

I would be happy to find any new species, and I would name it in memory of my father, that teached me to love and protect nature

9

I’ve found a couple undescribed Collembola so far, but I surely won’t be the one to describe it :joy:

10

If you want to see some silliness that people have used for real species, this website has a lot of them:

https://www.curioustaxonomy.net

My favorite recent moth one was Troubridge’s Hyppa potamus (pronounced hippopotamus). He also tried to name one of the many Sympistis he described Sympistis pants, but that one didn’t make it through review. lol

I’ve wanted to name a new Lacinipolia species to call it Lacinipolia aurea, so its common name would be Golden Arches, just to see if McDonalds tried to stop me.

11

We were doing a project where we would look at fig wasps under a dissecting microscope My friend was looking at fig wasps under a dissecting microscope when he found a fig wasp with a striped abdomen and very short ovipositor. He asked a professional to ID it but the professional couldn’t really put a finger on it, and all the wasps were put in buffer tubes to be sent for genetic sequencing to see their species. If that is really a new species, he is considering naming it the “Stripy-Bum Fig Wasp” because its abdomen was striped. Maybe it’s too informal but like he discovered it. In fact, it’s actually an active observation I put up, though it’s kind of trash since my friend took the microscope pic on his phone and another one of my friends took the picture of his phone picture which is now the one I have.
Observation link: Fig wasps (Family Agaonidae) from Sherwood Arboretum on July 27, 2026 by Shayaan Shehjad. It’s a microscopic image of a fig wasp from a Cluster Fig. · iNaturalist

12

Did it have wings?

13

It’s not really new, but undescribed: I’ve found several individuals of “Katiannidae gen. nov. 1 sp. nov.2”, and I feel like Austrokatianna cuprea could be a good name (“austro” because they’re thought to be imported from Australia, “cuprea” because they’re often orange dorsally)