As some of you may have noticed, the Latin names I give here in my posts do not always match the tags seen in the photos. This tag was on the Lesser Florican (Sypheotides indicus) from last week, but as you can see, the tag doesn’t match the current English common name or the current Latin name. So what’s going on with the naming system?
Common names have a tendency to be confusing. The same bird can have different names across its range, all depending on human culture. It can have names in multiple languages, different names in societies that each named the species before meeting each other, or occasionally multiple names or nicknames all in one culture. Obviously, this can lead to serious confusion when talking about a single species. One person is talking about an Eared Bustard, and another person might wonder if it’s closely related to a Lesser Florican. Yikes!
This is where Latin names come in to play. European naturalists began using Latin, binomial names to officially describe species in the 1750s, allowing different scientists to reference the same species uniformly, regardless of their native language. This also allows relationships to be seen between species, as their full name includes their genus name and their species name, much how most people have a last name (showing relationship, like a genus name) and a first name (showing the individual, like a species). This system is now widely used as the global standard. However, many species were named before their relationships with other species were properly known.
Changes in how we understand evolution and the diversity of species occasionally lead us to ‘drastic’ measures, like changing a scientific name. If we find out that two recognized species are actually one species, or vice-versa, we make the name changes to show this. Considering how much we’ve learned in the last forty years about ornithological evolution, it’s no surprise that we’ve had to change many names, even occasionally moving entire sections of a genus into a new family (that section then gets its own genus name). Museums have to find a system that works for keeping up. For one, having everything cataloged virtually with individual identification numbers helps when an old tag doesn’t match current research. There just isn’t time to change the handwritten label on each specimen. On top of that, having a system to determine which old names became which current names can help. The UMMZ staff tends to use the Howard and Moore Complete Checklist of the Birds of the World, which has a good index of past names that guides to the current ones, or the online database Avibase for more thorough searches.
While Latin names were supposed to be a permanent solution to multiple names, the ever-fluctuating way that we look at bird evolution proves that the best ideas are those that remain flexible as we learn more about our world.
This. Exactly this.
Taxonomists don’t change names willy nilly. Like any other science, as we continue to gather data and test our hypotheses (because remember, every species is an hypothesis waiting to be tested by new characters or new specimens), our hypotheses continue to evolve, and we track the evolution of these hypotheses by changing, adapting, and keeping records of what we call specimens, populations, and species.
We realize it’s a pain when you find out a species you know and love now goes by a different name; we have to adapt and continually update our thinking & records too. But rather than get annoyed at those cruddy taxonomists for wrecking everything and upsetting that thing that you thought you knew, instead take a moment to appreciate that the species you know and love is literally on the cutting edge of science, and that its new nomenclature signifies a shared appreciation for it by someone else who cares for it just as much as you do.
