Why do animals need Latin names?
Three-minute read
Scientific names are universal. No matter what country you’re in or what language you speak, Tursiops truncatus always means bottlenose dolphin.
We use a binomial naming system, which means species are allotted two names. Tursiops is the name of the genus and truncatus is the name of the species.
Ugh, Latin? Genus? This is getting quite science-y. I hear you, but stay with me. I think the only way to proceed is to lean into it and climb down into the terminology crevasse.
Animals are classified at several different levels. Species are grouped together depending on how closely-related they are, first on a broad scale then divided up more and more down the chain.
The first level of classification is called a kingdom. There are five. Every living thing on earth is an animal, plant, fungi, protist (organised single-celled organism) or monera (simple single-celled organism).
Let me give you an example with a real species. But whatever will I choose? How about … a bottlenose dolphin?
Kingdom - Animalia
Phylum - Chordata (back-boned animals)
Class - Mammalia
Order - Cetacea (whales)
Suborder - Odontoceti (toothed whales)
Family - Delphinidae (dolphins)
Genus - Tursiops
Species - truncatus
The categories start out broad but quickly narrow down to individual species. We classify all animals like this, even humans. Our Latin name is Homo sapiens and it roughly translates to ‘human with knowledge’. And now you know that, you’re a human with even more knowledge.
I mention this in the podcast but it bears repeating. Bottlenose dolphins are named truncatus because their beaks are short compared to most other dolphins.
Most animals have scientific names based on their physical attributes. My favourite example is the genus Mustela. It refers to the family of weasels, stoats and polecats. Ferrets and mink are mustelids too.
That family name is an amalgam of two Greek words meaning ‘mouse’ and ‘spear’. Literally, long mouse. I find that so charming. It’s like a mouse but it’s long like a spear, why not just call it that?
Other animals are named after the people that discovered them. It turns out if you find a new species you can call it whatever you want. In the olden days naturalists liked using their own names but today we get a bit more creative.
There are animals named after celebrities, like the tiny lemur named after prosimian enthusiast John Cleese. There’s a bat species named after Ozzy Osborne and as I mentioned in the show there was a species found in a swampy pool christened Eucritta melanolimnites, AKA The Creature from the Black Lagoon.
The father of the classification system was Carl Linnaeus. He was a Swedish zoologist, botanist and human medical doctor that lived from 1707 to 1778. He gave scientific names to 12,000 species throughout his career. Some of those have been renamed in recent years as we’ve discovered more about them.
At university I had to learn every British mammal by its Latin name and it weirdly made me love them. It’s like a peek into the mind of the scientist that first classified them.
Were they arrogant enough to use their own name? Did they take the opportunity to pay tribute to someone influential? Or did they just say what they saw?
Linnaeus knocked it out the park with a particular species of snake. Its Latin name was so good that it caught on and became its common name too. Boa constrictor is the only animal on Earth that we all only know by its formal name.
We can’t give two species the same name, so as we discover more I think the names can only get more interesting. I’ll be sure to post if a newly-discovered species gets given a funny name (though I’m sure it’ll be breaking news, I don’t know how you’ll miss it).
