Systematists have a strange sense of humour 24 Mar 2011 Some funny new names seen recently: Aussiedraco, a new pteranodontoid pterosaur genus from Australia [1]. Pronounced “ozzydrayco”, one can only hope someone finds a new species and calls it oioioi. Pantydraco [2] – It’s behind you! Pinkfloydia, a new genus of spiders from Western Australia [3] A word of advice: if you are committed to a funny name for the genus, go all out and use a funny epithet too. The authors had six species of Pinkfloydia to play with; they should have been called meddlensis, ummagumma, echi, obscuralunaris, volustehic (sorry!), and laterinmuri. 1. Kellner, Alexander W.A.; Rodiriques, Taissa and Costa, Fabiana R. 2011 Short note on a Pteranodontoid pterosaur (Pterodactyloidea) from western Queensland, Australia. Anais da Academia Brasileira de Ciências 83 (1): 301-308. ISSN 0001-3765 2. Galton, Peter & Kermack, Diane, 2010. The anatomy of Pantydraco caducus, a very basal sauropodomorph dinosaur from the Rhaetian (Upper Triassic) of South Wales, UK. Revue de Paléobiologie 29 (2) : 341–404 (décembre 2010) 3. Dimitar Dimitrov, Gustavo Hormiga, 2011. An extraordinary new genus of spiders from Western Australia with an expanded hypothesis on the phylogeny of Tetragnathidae (Araneae). Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society 161, 4, 735–768, April 2011. Thanks to Dave Williams for the pointer. Humor Systematics
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Genius. Took me a second to work out volustehic. I wonder if there would be a subspecies like P. volustehic volustehic. Or maybe another species like Pinkfloydia animalia with sub species P. animalia cani, P. animalia porci. and so on….? OK, joke was better before I laboured it.
Please, consider it a very small repayment for your species book, which helped enormously with one of my comps.
OK, so we can try more then? P. laterinmuri amoriuvenis P. laterinmuri commodustorpeo P. volustehic fulgediamonsinsanum OK, my latin just isn’t that good. 🙂
I just had a thought, does laterinmuri translate as ‘a brick in the wall’? I was thinking you were saying brick wall, as in The Wall album, not any song. Well, my names are even worse then. I was naming things like Pinkfloyd the wall comfortably numb (genus, species, sub-species) in analogy to band, album, track. But it seems all I was saying was Pinkfloyd brick in the wall comfortably numb. D’oh!
Not paries? I was thinking muri made sense because muro is Spanish for wall. Spanish being derived from vulgar latin and all that. Then again, muri seems quite close to mouse: mus, muris, muri, …. Ah well.
According to my lexicon maceria is a garden brick wall, which matched the visual from the concert and film.
I grant you Maceria. Your lexicon is more ample than mine. I’ve got an icon! Where’d that come from? I like it, a grotesque, weird thing with canines.
Those who lack Gravatars will now have weird things attached to their names… I’m playing around. Did you notice that your comment is previewed below as you type?
I did notice that phantasm, but I assumed it was just another mental issue I’d need to deal with. Turn out I don’t.
Well, I might be wrong here, I was wrong about laterinmuri, but volustehic seems to be wish you were here. Volu = wish or volition, ste = to stand, be somewhere, hic = here.