WIP
[Instrumental Intro]
[Recap]
(yawns)
Hey, kids.
I just woke up from a nap I took in January of 2020 and boy, are my arms tired.
Let's see what I missed.
Hmm. Queen's dead, war in Ukraine, the Taliban's back... wh- what is... holy shit!
They made a movie called Scoob!
Unprecedented global pandemic, Space Jam 2, some popular guy named Brandon, yep, that just about covers it.
[Topic Starts]
Anyway, we all know about the scientific names of animals, but did you ever wonder what they actually mean?
To find out, we must look to taxonomists.
They're the guys responsible for the systems of nomenclature we use to classify organisms, and boy, are they convoluted.
First, you got the big eight.
Domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species.
I've seen plenty of pneumonic devices for this, but since the "D" just showed up in the 90s and is still disputed by some scientists, he's usually not included. So allow me to suggest a few.
Dizzy kids puke cereal on fair ground staff.
Dumb kittens pushing cups over feeds growing spite.
Donkey Kong's [redacted] [redacted] [redacted] fucking [redacted] serendipitously.
The way this whole thing works differs slightly depending on which kingdom you pick, so today we'll be sticking to the animal one 'cause that one's the coolest, and I'm in it.
So what constitutes each taxon is pretty arbitrary, they basically just serve to act as a set of branches in the tree that taxonomists build.
The one exception is species, which is generally defined as any group of animals that can have babies with eachother that aren't sterile freaks.
Mule, liger, zedonk, skunkape; they can live fulfilling lives, but they're all shooting blanks so they don't count.
On the other hand in our innumerable trespasses against God, we can make things like chi-dane-danes, which actually work, so dogs are dogs are dogs.
Besides species though, it's the wild west in here. Plenty of times, eight tiers isn't even enough for scientists, so they just stick new sublevels in between.
Legions, cohorts, tribes, series, divisions, and if you wanna keep going, you can throw all kinds of prefixes on any of these for even more layers.
There's even subspecies, which, the more pedantic of you may think to yourselves that creating names for subspecies at all kind of undermines the single somewhat-agreed-upon definition in the whole tree.
To that, my friends, taxonomists say "ughu-uh (I dunno)"
But while that's pretty complex, the actual names themselves are pretty easy to wrap your head around. Though taxonomists may hide behind their fancy Greek and Latin, the volgade is no substitute for wit.
Now, I scraped through the scientific names of a load of species, and most of them can be split into a few categories.
[Direct Translation]
The simplest ones are the animals that already have names in Greek or Latin.
(Taxonomist): "It's a lion, I'm calling it "Leo". Done. Tiger, it's a Tigris, cat, it's a Catus, easy."
[Binomial Nomenclature]
Multiword names can be translated the same way. For the golden eagle, we got "Aquila chrysaetos" "gold eagle eagle". They decided to be a show-off and do eagle in Greek and Latin, essentially the same, though.
["Creativity"]
But if a species is too specific or exotic for a one-to-one translation, that's when you gotta get a little creative. A lot of the time, inspiration comes from just givin' the creature the ol' once-over and pointing out some cool-looking body part.
Generally, the more distinct of an identifying feature it is, the more likely it'll get in the name. For example, homeboy took one look at this thing and said "Yup. Red triangle slug. I'm going on break."
We call this thing a fuckin' unicorn, almost like that means "one horn" or something. Also, some guy deadass looked at an octopus and said "Well, all they got is heads and feet, imma call 'em "headfoot". And now biologists everywhere say "cephalopod" unironically.
Matter of fact, if it's got feet, chances are that's part of its name somewhere.
[Music]
Ya got four feet, six feet
Eight feet, ten feet,
Two feet, equal feet
Both feet, double feet
Stomach feet, lip feet
Sucker feet, wing feet
Big feet, slow feet
Oar feet, boat feet
Joint feet, no feet
Ten thousand feet
Calloused feet, spade feet
Cat feet, small feet
[Talking]
If it doesn't look that interesting, another thing to point out is where you found it. This could be a territory like "American bear" or "Siamese crocodile", or just a habitat like "wood macaque" or "toilet rat".
