The taxonomists lament, pt. 1 - patronyms.
Last edited Tue Jul 8, 2025, 07:35 PM - Edit history (3)
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been part of a discussion concerning the diversity and nomenclature of a group of modern crocodiles. I won’t go deep into the specifics, except to say that what we thought was one species at the turn of the millennium may actually be three species based on new data.
The number of species, and their relationships to each other, are clear from what we now know. But what isn’t clear is the species name we should use for one of them. Although it’s a “new” species insofar as it’s only recently been recognized as a distinct species, 18th and 19th century naturalists and travelers would often establish new “species” based on what they collected, saw, or sometimes just heard about. And based on the rules of nomenclature, we’re supposed to determine whether any of these older names applies to the new species before coming up with a new name. It’s called the principle of priority – if multiple species names refer to the same species, we’re supposed to go with the first to be published.
The thing is, it’s not always clear whether a name first published in 1800 actually refers to the species we’re working with. Modern protocols weren’t in place. Was it collected in its habitat, or acquired through trade (meaning it could have come from far away)? Does this original specimen still exist in a museum collection – and if so, would we recognize it? Was it illustrated at the time? How accurate are the illustrations? Was the author even looking at just one species? (At least one modern crocodile species was named based on specimens from Egypt and Brazil.) Did the author actually see any of this, or was he reporting what someone else told him? Did subsequent authors using the same name refer to the same kind of animal?
This can take a while to sort out. Most people find it about as exciting as watching dead flies dangling from a spider web, but a few of us find it illuminating – even exciting at times. It forces us to confront how science was done in the past – and I do mean “confront.”
Anyway – one of the species names that might apply is niger.
In English, this would be pronounced with a soft “g,” as for the countries of Nigeria and Niger. But during a video conference, one of my European colleagues – not a native English speaker – used a hard “g,” as a proper interpretation of the Latin would actually require.
I explained to him that such a pronunciation would get him in very deep trouble in the English-speaking world, even if what he was saying was herpetological and had zip to do with race.
It also evoked a memory. Several years ago, I was contacted by the dean’s office. A student had complained that I’d used a racial epithet in class. I was confused – I would NEVER do this. So I asked if I could meet with this student at the dean’s office. If I’d said or done anything inappropriate, I wanted to know so I wouldn’t do it again. And if I hadn’t, I wanted to know why someone thought I did.
Turns out, what the student saw was a slide that showed several living and extinct alligatorids, including the black caiman – Melanosuchus niger.
I explained to the dean and student that I wasn’t referring to human race at all. I was referring to a large South American crocodylian. The name niger is derived from a Latin root meaning dark or black – and this particular kind of caiman is, indeed, dark brown or black in color. It was coined by German naturalist Johann von Spix in 1825.
I wasn’t using the racial epithet with two g’s. The words share a Latin root, but are otherwise completely unrelated.
The student and dean both accepted my explanation, and I told the student that they hadn’t really done anything wrong – “niger” does look like the n-word, especially if you’re not familiar with it and it’s only shown briefly. And had I used the n-word, a complaint should have been lodged.
But this raised in my mind an issue with which many of us systematists have wrestled in recent years – what to do about scientific names that might be offensive? This, in turn, inspired me to bore all of you with my thoughts.
At present, there are four separate areas of controversy. I have stronger opinions about some than about others.
I’ll discuss these in three separate posts. Two of them have the same cause – patronymy - but (as shown below) can’t be treated the same way. There are also the problems of truly offensive scientific names and what can only be described as taxonomic vandalism, but I’ll cover those later.
PATRONYMS
“Patronyms” are taxa named after people. In formal nomenclature, a patronomic species of crocodile (Crocodylus) would look like Crocodylus johndoei (if named after a man), Crocodylus doeorum (if named after a family or a group bearing the name), or Crocodylus janedoeae (if named after a woman). If it’s a genus of crocodile, it might look like Doesuchus, Doechampsus, or Doeia. (None of these names is real.) In common nomenclature, these take the form of possessive adjectives –Doe’s darter, Doe’s mountain laurel, Doe’s beardless tyrannulet, Doe’s trapdoor spider, and so on.
These are controversial in part because some of these people, in retrospect, weren’t very nice. There are species named after brutal colonialists (e.g. many African species named after Cecil Rhodes or Henry Morton Stanley) or people who were just plain evil (e.g. the beetle Anophthalmus hitleri and butterfly Hypoptera mussolinii).
Usually, these names weren’t established to honor the worst aspects of these people – or at least, not aspects of these people that would have been seen as evil at the time. The imperial efforts of Rhodes and Stanley were celebrated in the UK and elsewhere before we realized the true cost of colonialism, and A. hitleri was named by an Austrian entomologist after the Anschluss and shortly before the Second World War - someone who evidently admired the German chancellor. No one would name something after any of these gentlemen these days.
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What can we do?
In the case of formal scientific names, nothing. The rules of nomenclature just don’t allow for this. There are actually published rules for biological nomenclature we're supposed to use - the ICZN (International Code of Zoological Nomenclature) for animals, ICBN (International Code of Botanical Nomenclature) for plants, and so on. And above the genus level, PhyloCode has emerged as an alternative to the ICZN and ICBN. (I'm not entirely happy with PhyloCode, but I'm a full-throated supporter of the phylogenetic nomenclature it governs and more than happy to use it in place of the ICZN for clade names - though for genera and species, the ICZN is still the code.) More in the discussion if anyone's a glutton for punishment). These codes are governed by bodies ("commissions" ) that rule on nomenclatural disputes. The codes read more like legal documents than biological treatises. They're also available online if you have any inclination to read them - and who doesn't?
There are all kinds of reasons names can be dropped, but the person it’s named after was a genocidal prick isn’t one of them. So the debate in this case focuses on whether the rules themselves should be changed, and there’s very little chance of that happening any time soon. I’ll say more about this later, and discuss it further in later posts.
Common names are more easily changed, because there are no formal rules governing them. About five years ago, the American Birding Association renamed the McCown’s longspur It was named for the Army officer who collected the original specimen, but this particular Army officer switched from the US Army to the CS army during the Civil War. In the wake of the 2020 protests and the infamous Central Park birder confrontation, in which a white woman confronted a Black man who was birding – after all, a Black man walking around Central Park with a pair of binoculars and a field guide, and who keeps looking at birds, must be up to no good – the decision was made to rename the bird. It’s now the thick-billed longspur.
I’m all in favor of doing this for common names – but I would prefer that it be done carefully and with serious consideration. Nomenclature exists to facilitate communication, and any time a name changes, there’s the danger of confusion.
It's basically a cost-benefit analysis. Renaming anything - a bird, a person, a location - comes at the cost of having to remember more things. This, in turn, can lead to confusion when different people are using different names for the same person, place, or thing. If the benefit outweighs the cost, we accept the cost. But it's not always easy to know whether the benefits will even happen, much less justify the cost.
The American Birding Association famously made the decision a couple of years ago to rename every North American bird currently bearing a patronym. The hope is that this will create a more inviting environment for people of color who might want to take up birding. This was part of the rationale behind renaming the McCown’s longspur. None of these North American birds, to my knowledge, honors a person of color, and the ABA argues that renaming these birds will help create a more welcoming environment within the birding community.
The benefits could be huge, but there are costs. To begin with, I haven’t seen any evidence that this will actually have the intended effect. This will mean a lot of work for a lot of people, most of whom would not like seeing centuries of nomenclatural stability up-ended without benefit. Granted, I haven’t seen evidence it won’t work, either – but that’s because it hasn’t been tried before. It’s a gamble, and I have no idea how it will work out. Are there other things we could be doing? Like not assuming a Black birder is a peeping tom, and speaking up loudly in defense of those who encounter racism? Or outreach to diverse communities, showing how much bird diversity can be found even in their own neighborhoods? I don’t know, but I’d feel a whole lot better about this if I did.
It’s not just a handful of names. There are more than 150 birds in the ABA area (US and Canada) whose common names are patronyms. Renaming all of them will cause chaos. And if this is also done for butterflies, dragonflies, reptiles and amphibians, beetles, mollusks, wildflowers, and fishes – groups of interest to their own communities of hobbyists and sportsmen – confusion will only grow. I don’t know how long this chaos would last, but there would definitely be a lot of confusion at the outset.
And there would be material costs; we’d have to rewrite all of our field guides and textbooks, and parks would have to re-do all of the checklists they provide to visitors. Museums would have to change signage in their exhibits, and as someone who's worked in museums, I can assure you - this is NOT cheap. Maybe this will be worth it, or maybe it won’t – but either way, it’ll be a massive pain in the tush.
Are all patronyms bad? Lucy’s warbler is named after Lucy Hunter Baird, who was the daughter of an ornithologist; so far as anyone can tell, she didn’t do anything wrong. (Neither did her father, though as a scientist at the Smithsonian during the 19th century, he would have been surrounded by the same people who robbed Native American gravesites and treated non-white people as lesser forms of primate. Guilt by association, I suppose.). Lots of things are named after Barack Obama, including a fossil lizard (Obamadon gracilis) and a modern puffbird ( Nystalus obamai). So sometimes, the honorific is actually deserved.
There are gray areas. There are lots of animals, especially birds, named after John James Audubon – Audubon’s warbler, Audubon’s oriole, Audubon’s shearwater, and so on – but though he played a central role in the early growth of American environmentalism and ornithology, he was also a slaveholder. When it comes to Confederate veterans, are we talking about a high-ranking officer who was a rich plantation owner (and slaveholder) before the war and who fought against Reconstruction in its aftermath? Or was he a poor, illiterate dirt farmer who got conscripted and barely made it home alive? I don’t necessarily see these as equivalent.
And sometimes, a species is named after someone that’s evil, but for good reasons. There are two species named after the decerebrate facultative biped in the White House – a moth (Neopalpa donaldtrumpi) and, though it’s not official yet, a caecilian (a type of limbless amphibian – Dermophis donaldtrumpi - which I won't italicize). The moth makes sense – its head is covered in orange-white scales resembling the hairy organism living on the president’s head. The caecilian name was proposed – though at present, it’s not been formally established – as the result of an auction held by a conservation group. This looked like a serious blunder on their part until the auction’s winner explained that, like Old Colostomy, this caecilian – a burrowing animal – keeps its head buried in the sand.
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That said, some patronyms really can be problematic – and I’ve been involved in at least one such situation.
In 2013, I revised the extinct hoofed crocodiles. I determined that the name used for most of those in North America and Europe (Pristichampsus) had to be set aside. The next available names, published in the same 1938 monograph, were Boverisuchus and Weigeltosuchus. Following standard procedures, I determined that Boverisuchus was the correct one. But a few years later, some colleagues informed me of a mistake I’d made in that revision. There were several possible solutions, and they graciously asked if I’d co-author the paper addressing the mistake with them.
The problem? They were also arguing that we should go with Weigeltosuchus and not Boverisuchus. And if I was part of that, I’d never be able to show my face in front of my wife’s family again. Or my wife. Or anyone in my department. Or most of my friends. In fact, I’d have a very hard time looking at myself in the mirror.
Johannes Weigelt made some very strong contributions to paleontology. Most notably, he invented the field of taphonomy – the study of what happens to organic remains between death and burial. But he was also a Nazi. I don’t just mean joined-the-party-so-I-could-keep-my-job Nazi, either – he was a true believer. He actively worked to get Jewish professors and students kicked out of his university. He wanted to remodel his institution on National Socialist principles. He consulted for a mining company known at the time to be using concentration-camp forced labor. There’s even a picture of him with Hermann Goering.
My wife and her family are Jewish. So there was no way I could coauthor such a paper, even if I was an emotionless scumbag who agreed with their reasoning – which, I'd like to think, I'm not.
In the end, we concluded that the problem could be fixed by publishing a note correcting the mistake I made, and that Boverisuchus was the correct name to use. But I encountered a basic fact that makes dealing with these problems difficult - the unwillingness of many systematists to change offensive names.
The first version we submitted included some text written by me arguing that when multiple names might be available for one species, we should include ethical considerations in making our decision. I acknowledged the gray-area problem, but argued that enthusiastic support of the Nazi Party took the issue far from the gray-not gray boundary. And the reviewers – both from Europe, though neither from Germany – argued that such considerations are unwarranted, and even inappropriate. So what if Weigelt was a National Socialist? The name is just a label, after all, and we shouldn’t let modern sensibilities get in the way of nomenclatural stability. Rules are rules.
The fact that the global crocodyliform systematics community isn’t large enough to fill the average Chili's, meaning the level of confusion would be minimal, didn’t seem to make an impression. Neither did the fact that “being a Nazi is bad” isn’t just a “modern sensibility” – this was taught to me when Nixon was president and astronauts still flew to the moon. Nor, for that matter, did the fact that we were deciding among multiple possible names and not setting aside the name clearly favored by the rules. As far as these people were concerned, adherence to the code – something I acknowledge is important – shouldn’t just be the top priority; it should be the only priority.
And that’s why it’s easy enough to change common names, but not scientific names. Many of my colleagues take a very legalistic approach to the subject.
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I’ll pick up with this tomorrow, when I discuss names that are offensive in and of themselves. There are species whose names are racial epithets, for example. These create an even deeper level of concern for people like me. More on that tomorrow.
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I love your posts, which I read over morning coffee. Now I must go walk my little canis familiaris. 