THE NAMES WITHIN THE NAMES

AMNH scientists honored with an array of scientific names

Paralamyctes prendinii, Zygothrica desallei, Pumilia novaceki: if you look closely at scientific names of these living and extinct species, Museum curators like Lorenzo Prendini, Rob DeSalle, and Michael Novacek jump from the page. Now, Melanie Stiassny, whose name was previously lent to an African electric catfish, has been doubly honored by the proposal of Stiassnyiformes as a name for a large order of fish within the spiny rayed group. Colleagues from the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris are revising the messy taxonomic relationships among the 16,000 spiny rayed fish that exploded in numbers about 60 million years ago and represent about a third of all known vertebrates.

A skeleton of a grouper within the proposed order Stiassnyiformes. (Click to see a larger image.)

Melanie Stiassny/AMNH

"The spiny rayed fish are a massive problem for morphologists," says Stiassny. "In 1993, I suggested that the grey mullet—at loose ends taxonomically—was related to guppies, damselfish, and other species. What is really cool is that the new molecular survey found strong support for this idea."

Colleagues often use the names of scientists to honor their discoveries. Mark Siddall, for example, used DNA analysis and electron microscopy to upend what was known about a parasite that infects fish; Myxobolus siddalli is not related to single-celled protozoans but to jellyfish and other cnidarians. Mammalogist Rob Voss also has a parasite named after him. As he muses, "So far, just one fossil mouse and one filarial parasite have been named for me. I think both were well-intentioned, but with parasite names, one never knows!"

When it comes to scientists studying animals encased in exoskeletons, the numbers of species bearing a scientist's name jumps, although this is not surprising since arthropods are such a large portion of the world's biota. Off the top of his head, wasp taxonomist Jim Carpenter can recall a Vietnamese stingless bee and five species of potter wasps named after him, while Toby Schuh has had three genera of true bugs named for him: the neotropical groups Schuhocoris, Schuhella, and Schuhgaster—all based on specimens he collected. Norm Platnick and Jerry Rozen, who have been in the Division of Invertebrate Zoology for 35 and 49 years, respectively, each have about two dozen species that bear their names. Platnick, for example, connected a genus of tarantulas known only from female specimens to a group of small, bizarre, and enigmatic males (each species is highly sexually dimorphic), and the bee Zikanapis rozenorum was one of the species named for both Rozen and his wife to highlight their shared fieldwork.

Numerous arthropods are also named after their entomology colleague David Grimaldi, but these are fossilized in amber. His favorite patronym is a primitive spider from Burma that dates to 100 million years ago and throws previously neat predictions based on living species—namely, that this group was found only in the southern hemisphere—into disarray. Paleontologist John Maisey finds the ephemeral nature of scientific names amusing. "There is a genus named after me—Maiseyodus—a fossil shark known only from its teeth. Besides being a rather clumsy construction, it was never officially published," he recalls. "And a good friend named a trilobite after my wife, Tormesiscus gloriae. She was thrilled... until she discovered it was blind!" Ornithologist George Barrowclough also notes that eponymous species names can be ephemeral: of two subspecies of South American birds that bear his name, he thinks that only the one found on an isolated mesa during Museum expeditions to Venezuela continues to represent a distinct population.

Propithecus tattersalli.

David Haring/DUPC

The fate of many species names, though, lies not in whether they are published or remain valid; species bearing the names of some curators are now extinct or at low population numbers. Ichthyologist John Sparks believes that a Malagasy fish that he and his wife collected from a forest stream (and named for them as Pachypanchax sparksorum) may no longer exist, and reptile expert Darrel Frost thinks that the same fate has probably felled the Central American alligator lizard from Guatemala. Propithecus tattersalli, the golden-crowned sifaka first observed in northeastern Madagascar by Ian Tattersall, is a critically endangered primate according to IUCN's Red List. Also from Madagascar and probably extinct is a tiny shrew-tenrec named for Ross MacPhee because he helped revise the group's taxonomy. "My only eponymous fame is to have one of the world's smallest extinct insectivores named after me (it would have weighed, at most, a few grams), even though I am presumably best known for working on big Pleistocene extinct species like mammoths," he says.

Posted: March 27, 2009