cellarspider:

zombiedata:

askmetocutyourhairandillkillyou:

And I saw something on their front page that I assumed was the result of someone screwing around that hadn’t been cleaned up yet

So I followed the link, thinking it would lead me to Angelina Jolie’s page with some amusing changes made to it, but instead I found this:

There is actually a trapdoor spider named after Angelina Jolie. And one named after Bono. And Stephen Colbert. Apparently the same scientist discovered  all of these and really like naming spiders after celebrities.

There’s also a Barack Obama Trapdoor Spider!  And an A. sarlacc!  That whole genus is filled with wild names.

Entomologists are just. They do this. Other biologists too, but especially entomologists There’s ants named after Douglas Adams (Tetramorium adamsi), two genera of wasps named after Dante, (Aligheria and Aligherinia), ELEVEN species named after David Attenborough (including a beetle, shrimp, echidna, fish, grasshopper, dragonfly, three plants, two spiders, and a plesiosaur), Two worms named after the Beatles (and no beetles that I’m aware of), two David Bowie spiders (Heteropoda davidbowie and Spintharus davidbowiei).

There’s wasps for both

Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt (the aforementioned angelinajolieae and Conobregma bradpitti), and Stephen Colbert not only has a spider named after him, but he also then set off a competition between other researchers to name a “way cooler” animal after him, which due to, again, entomologists, ended him up with two beetles, a stonefly, and a wasp (Agaporomorphus, Sonoma, Diamphipnoa and Aleiodes colberti). A fly with a golden butt is named for Beyoncé. There’s an HP Lovecraft wasp named Nanocthulhu lovecrafti. Terry Pratchett got a turtle (

Psephophorus terrypratchetti) and I could not possibly be more happy about that.

And if you wander away from people and into bands, there’s a Radiohead ant (

Sericomyrmex radioheadi), a Green Day plant (Macrocarpaea dies-viridis), a Muse wasp (Goniozus musae), Pink Floyd gets a

shrimp, spider genus, and wasp (

Synalpheus pinkfloydi,

Pinkfloydia,
Cephalonomia pinkfloydi) . Some maniac individually named four different trilobites after each of the Ramones (

Mackenziurus ceejayi, deedeei,

joeyi, and johnnyi.)

I’d complain about how unsystematic this is but how can I get mad when there’s a Terry Pratchett turtle.