Following on from the last post, which looked at animals named after musicians, here are some of the species with nomenclature based on famous actors and directors.
All but one of these humans have been nominated for an Academy Award at some stage in their careers. Which one has yet to receive Oscar recognition?
Agra katewinsletae
Buried in a lengthy paper on 29 new species of ground beetle from Costa Rica published in 2002, entomologist Terry Erwin named one of the insects after Kate Winslet, following her role in the movie Titanic. “Her character did not go down with the ship, but we will not be able to say the same for this elegant canopy species, if all the rain forest is converted to pastures,” wrote Erwin in Zootaxa.
Agra liv
Erwin obviously had a thing for Hollywood, naming another of his Costa Rican beetles after Liv Tyler, “starlet of the movie Armageddon.” The justification was a little tenuous. “The existence of this species of elegant beetle is dependent upon the rainforest not undergoing Armageddon which is too much to hope for,” he wrote.
Calponia harrisonfordi
This interesting little spider from California was first described in 1993 by Norman I. Platnick, then curator of entomology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. He named it after Harrison Ford, “in recognition of his efforts on behalf of the American Museum.” Whilst most caponiid spiders have only two eyes, this reddish-orange specimen has retained the ancestral eight, making it “one of the most primitive members of the family.” For more, go see American Museum Novitates. This spider, by the way, is not the only species named after Ford. There’s also an ant from Central America Pheidole harrisonfordi, a species that Edward O. Wilson named after Ford “in recognition of his outstanding contribution in service and support to tropical conservation, hence the habitats in which the Pheidole ants will continue to exist.”
Coloborhynchus spielbergi
A pterosaur from the early Cretaceous period, excavated in Brazil and described by paleontologist Andre J. Veldmeijer in 2003. The fossilized remains – a skull, jawbone and lots of skeletal fragments – suggested the pterosaur had a wingspan of almost 6m and a body length of around 1.5 m, roughly half of which was skull. In Scripta Geologica, Veldmeijer and colleagues wrote that they’d named the flying reptile “in honour of Steven Spielberg, the director of the three Jurassic Park movies in which dinosaurs and pterosaurs were animated.” One of its most striking features is “a large anteriorly positioned premaxillary sagittal crest”, basically a hefty crest on the top of its upper jaw that “may have been an instrument for recognition and courtship display.”
Hydroscapha redfordi
In 2007, scientists collected several hundred beetle specimens from the Jerry Johnson Hot Springs in northern Idaho. They turned out to belong to a new species and Crystal Meier and colleagues, writing in The Coleopterists Bulletin, named it “in honor of actor/conservationist Robert Redford, whose 1972 portrayal of the semi-fictional Jeremiah Johnson in the film of the same name brought attention to the character as well as the beauty of the region.” It is not clear how the Jerry Johnson Hot Springs got their name but it almost certainly had nothing to do with the film or Redford.
Kootenichela deppi
Another fossil, this time a Cambrian arthropod that lived around 510 million years ago. The creatures of the Cambrian sported some crazy evolutionary innovations and K. deppi is no exception. Perhaps most striking is its pair of “great appendages”, each with three spiny finger-like projections. The beast, which was about 5cm long, is named after Johnny Depp “for his portrayal of Edward Scissorhands in the 1990 film of the same name,” wrote paleontologist David Legg in the Journal of Paleontology in 2013.
Who’s the odd one out?
All of the above have been nominated or won an Academy Award, except for Liv Tyler.
