10 Ridiculous Scientific Names
There aren't as many rules to naming a scientific discovery as you might think-- and that has led to some pretty outrageous names. Hosted by: Michael Aranda ...
==========
Until the mid-1700s, the names we used to identify living things were… a bit of a mess. At the time, a lot of scientific names were trying to both identify and describe species, and some of them were like 12 words long. In 1753, a Swedish botanist named Carl Linnaeus [lih-NEE-us] tried to fix this problem by developing the simpler, two-word system that we still use today: Every species has both a generic name -- what we’d call a genus name -- followed by its trivial, or species name. He argued that it didn’t really matter what the name was, as long as every species got a unique label and everybody agreed to use it. That’s why, today, the rules for naming a new species aren’t very strict. If you find it, you get to name it, and pretty much anything goes, as long as you use the ...
==========
Until the mid-1700s, the names we used to identify living things were… a bit of a mess. At the time, a lot of scientific names were trying to both identify and describe species, and some of them were like 12 words long. In 1753, a Swedish botanist named Carl Linnaeus [lih-NEE-us] tried to fix this problem by developing the simpler, two-word system that we still use today: Every species has both a generic name -- what we’d call a genus name -- followed by its trivial, or species name. He argued that it didn’t really matter what the name was, as long as every species got a unique label and everybody agreed to use it. That’s why, today, the rules for naming a new species aren’t very strict. If you find it, you get to name it, and pretty much anything goes, as long as you use the ...
