I'm so glad that entomologist Doug Yanega's list of funny, actual scientific names is still online. It's from the very early days of the internet, and still updated.
Support is urgently requested to help keep Kew Herbarium at Kew.
The Director and Trustees intend to move the #Herbarium over an hour away from its current location at the heart of Kew.
Separating the herbarium from the gardens, library, and laboratories will cripple the ongoing taxonomic work at a time when we are facing a dire biodiversity crisis.
Taxonomy is fun until you have to track down a paper written 20 years ago in an obscure Japanese journal about beetles that has near zero online presence.
Recent genomic studies show that the parasitic fly Braula evolved within Drosophilidae, flies we know as the workhorses of genetics. See link.
The problem: Braula was named in 1818.
Drosophila was named in 1823.
By the rules of priority, if we organize taxa by their ancestry, then the correct family placement for all these flies, including everyone's precious Drosophila melanogaster, is in Braulidae, not Drosophilidae.
Taxonomists have a long history of cataloging everything they could find. Worldwide expeditions, museums and universities have all committed to classifying specimens. Yet no single, unified list of all the species on Earth exists. Some scientists want to change that. Popular Science explains. https://flip.it/ram4oV #Science#Animals#Species#Taxonomy#Earth
Notorious herpetological taxonomic vandal, Ray Hoser, has just dropped some more 'papers' in his self produced journal. With species names like "fukdat", "watdafuk" and "muski" I think he is simply trolling at this stage.