Funny Scientific Names, Part 3

Parts 1 and 2 here, and yes it has been three years.

Crikey steveirwini – a snail

Buffalopterus (means “Buffalo wing”) – a eurypterid, AKA “sea scorpion”

Godiva – a nudibranch

Han solo – a trilobite (officially named after the Han Chinese and for being the last surviving species of its family, but that’s not fooling anyone)

Eoperipatus totoro – a velvet worm

Klobiodon rochei – a pterosaur, named after Nick Roche, a Transformers comic book artist who redesigned the Dinobots to be more scientifically accurate

Fubaricthys – a fossil fish

Scrotum humanum – the name initially given to the first (non-avian) dinosaur to be properly named; fortunately, it was obscure then, and became famous under the name Megalosaurus before anyone realized they were the same (can you imagine there being a sculpture of Scrotum in Victorian London?!)

Gelae baen, Gelae belae, Gelae donut, Gelae fish, and Gelae rol – fungus beetles

Dermophis donaldtrumpi – a blind amphibian that buries its head in the sand

Funny Scientific Names, part 2

Part 1 is here.

Spongiforma squarepantsii (yes, really)- a mushroom

Tinkerbella nana – a fairy fly

Ittibittium – a mollusk

Oedipus rex – a salamander

Megapnosaurus (means “big dead lizard”) – a dinosaur

Irritator challengeri – a dinosaur

Gojirasaurus – a dinosaur, obviously

Not the name of a creature, but “thagomizer” is the name for the spikes on the end of a Stegosaurus’s tail. It originated in this Far Side cartoon:

“Now this end is called the thagomizer … after the late Thag Simmons.”

And so finally, there is a louse named Strigiphilus garylarsoni.

Funny scientific names, part 1

I haven’t posted anything science-related in a while. If you’re at all familiar with the scientific names given to various creatures, you might have noticed that a few of them are weird or funny.

If you’re not familiar, the reason they have them in the first place is for international consistency; so scientists from all of the world can call a plant or animal by the same name. Most come from Greek or Latin, but not nearly all of them (in particular most of the funny ones don’t). The first word is the genus, the second is the species, and if there’s a third word it’s a subspecies.

Gaga germanotta – a fern (yes, it is named after Lady Gaga)

Hakuna matata – a wasp

Bison bison bison – take a guess (hint: bison)

Harryhausenia – a fossil sand crab

Laputavis – appropriately, a fossil swift

Brontomerus (means “thunder thigh”)- a dinosaur

Dracorex hogwartsia – a dinosaur

Bambiraptor – a dinosaur

Pantydraco – yet another dinosaur (this one is a coincidence; it’s named after Pant-y-ffynnon Quarry in Wales…which I need to remember if I ever do funny place names)

Zyzzyxdonta – a snail so slow it’s at the very end of the alphabet

Science of Anime: Blood Loss

Some anime have little or no blood in situations where you’d think somebody would be bleeding, but at the other extreme are the ones where people bleed far too much.

Science of Anime: Getter Rays

Getter Robo is full of things that defy the laws of physics, but it’s not really the physics that we’ll be looking into today. It’s the implications the title robot’s power source has for biology that concerns us.

Getter Rays are called the energy of evolution. (As is Spiral Power from Gurren Lagann, in direct homage to Getter.) They are said to be what originally wiped out the dinosaurs on the surface, and are still harmful to the reptilians of the Dinosaur Empire. Most of the other things they do don’t really have anything to do with evolution at all.

O is for Octopus

Everyone knows what an octopus is, but there are a lot of interesting facts about them that a lot of people don’t know.

I is for Intersex

Biological sex isn’t always as clear-cut as “everyone is either male or female”. There are whole classes of ways someone can be in between. Rather than risk getting anything wrong on about a topic like this I’m just going to provide a link.

Alice, one of the main characters in Project Quintessence, is intersex. Her specific condition isn’t named because, well, I couldn’t find a name for it. (The details are modeled after a real person, but that person doesn’t know a specific name for it either.)

Basics of evolution

 It has come to my attention recently that I might have readers who are unfamiliar with evolution, so I’ve decided to start a series of posts on the topic. And at the risk of being too basic, I’m going to start with the basics. (This is a slightly modified re-posting of something I said on a message board some time ago. The other posts in the series will be original.)

“Evolution”, in this sense, refers to the fact that species change over time. The “theory of evolution” refers to the accepted explanation of this fact, which has itself evolved over time starting from Charles Darwin’s original version. The theory is that some traits make individuals more likely to survive than others (this is called natural selection) or more likely to reproduce (sexual selection), and that these traits become more common while traits having the opposite effect become less common.

Dreadnoughtus: Gigantic, exceptionally complete sauropod dinosaur

And it has such an awesome name too.

After Big Bang

The new 65-ton (59,300 kg) dinosaur species Dreadnoughtus schrani is the largest land animal for which body mass can be accurately calculated. Its skeleton is the most complete ever found of its type, with over 70 percent of the bones, excluding the head, represented. Because all previously discovered supermassive dinosaurs are known from relatively fragmentary remains, Dreadnoughtus offers an unprecedented window into the anatomy and biomechanics of the largest animals to ever walk the Earth.

Illustration: Jennifer Hall

“Dreadnoughtus schrani was astoundingly huge,” said Kenneth Lacovara, PhD, an associate professor in Drexel University’s College of Arts and Sciences, who discovered the Dreadnoughtus fossil skeleton in southern Patagonia in Argentina and led the excavation and analysis. “It weighed as much as a dozen African elephants or more than seven T. rex. Shockingly, skeletal evidence shows that when this 65-ton specimen died, it was not yet full grown. It is by…

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Entirely new form of life discovered

Yes, it was originally found in 1986 and not examined until recently. Still, a new organism that doesn’t seem to belong to any known phylum was discovered near Tasmania.

It’s very small, shaped vaguely like a mushroom, and might not share a common ancestor with any known living creature in the last 500 million years.

“We think it belongs in the animal kingdom somewhere; the question is where.” – Jorgen Olesen