Free Dry Storeroom No. 1 by Richard Fortey Page A

italicized) was a decidedly female character in Mervyn Peake’s Gothic extravaganza, thus completing Fuchs’ sexual transmutation on the human scale. The epithet
magellanica
is a reference to the occurrence of the shrub as far south as the Straits of Magellan rather than a direct reference to the great explorer. However, as with Fuchs, it is quite common to name a plant or animal genus or species after somebody, often to honour his or her contribution to the field of study. I have done it myself for people who have collected specimens and then presented them to the Museum collections, or for professors who deserve recognition for all their hard work. It confers a modest piece of immortality. In the case of a species one needs to add a genitive suffix—as in
Fuchsia johnsmithi
—to show that this is John Smith’s species of
Fuchsia.
There are a few named
forteyi
species of fossil, all of them remarkably handsome examples of their kind. I should add that it is not regarded as good form to name a species after oneself; somebody else has to do it; modesty forbids after all. Nor is it permitted to cause offence by naming a creature
johnsmithi
after John Smith while stating that it is the most unattractive member of the genus. I have to say that Linnaeus himself did not follow this prescription, and named a useless weed
Siegesbeckia
after one of his enemies.
    Humour is a delicate matter in nomenclature. The clam genus
Abra
is crying out to be married with the species name
cadabra;
and so it was in a species named by Eames and Wilkins in 1957:
Abra cadabra,
a very satisfactory touch of humour. However, a subsequent authority decided that the species
cadabra
did not, after all, belong in
Abra
—so it was moved to another genus,
Theora,
and there is nothing very entertaining about
Theora cadabra.
This kind of decision happens all the time in systematic work, as a subsequent author concludes from careful study that a given species is better included in a genus different from the one to which it was originally assigned. Effectively, this moves the species from one drawer in the collections to another. Old views are dropped and new combinations of names have to be learned; this process is known as revision.
    Almost as good a pun as the
Abra
example is one of the numerous carabid beetles I mentioned above—
Agra phobia.
But my favourite remains the plant bugs described by one G. W. Kirkaldy in 1904. These genera all had the Greek suffix
-chisme,
pronounced “kiss me.” Kirkaldy managed to celebrate all the female objects of his affection by adding the appropriate prefix:
Polychisme, Marichisme, Dollichisme
and so on (there were rather a lot of them, apparently). Sexual innuendo is evidently irresistible to some taxonomists. It can be more blatant. Professor David Siveter of Leicester University is an expert on small crustaceans called ostracodes. In 2003 he and his colleagues published a paper on a magnificently preserved new fossil genus and species from the Silurian of England, which were some 425 million years old, under the resounding name
Colymbosathon ecplecticos.
If I might be forgiven for returning to the territory of “Biggus Dickus,” the remarkable fact about this ostracode was the size of its fossilized penis: if we translate the Greek, this Silurian species is “swimmer with astoundingly large penis.” Oddly enough, this attracted the attention of the press in a way that few new species have ever done.
The Sun,
always the leader in tastefulness, featured the story under the banner headline “OLD TODGER” the
Guardian
was hardly less brazen with “Well hung geologist.” I doubt whether
Science,
the distinguished magazine that published the original article, has previously been featured in the pages of
The Sun.
    To the scientific name is added the namer:
Abra cadabra
Eames and Wilkins, 1957, or
Colymbosathon ecplecticos
Siveter et al., 2003. This is so that readers will know who first described the organism