OK, so this neat little tool is many, many things, and one of them is definitely awesome, but one of them is also a weirdly interesting indictment of the taxonomic community.
So, the thing to understand is that taxonomists have no actual idea how many species have been described. Sure, we have a relatively good guess at the number (somewhere in the neighbourhood of 1.2 million), but we don’t actually have a single, 100% complete list where every species name is recorded and catalogued. I mean, it is 250+ years worth of names, and those names are really darn hard to find and keep track of, and until recently when computers and the internet came along, no one has really wanted to sit down and deal with that big ol’ mess. To give you an idea of how big a task this is, meet Charles Sherborn, who arguably did the best job ever by dedicating his life to the problem, but who still “only” managed to figure out the 444,000 names created between 1758 and 1850 before he died in 1942 (learn more about him on Wikipedia, or this entire series of papers in ZooKeys that recently looked back on his success and how we’ve progressed – or not – since then).
For a community that is generally regarded as being über pedantic and good at keeping records of the stuff relevant to our work, it’s a little weird & disappointing that taxonomists didn’t bother combining all of their information and keeping track of it as a cohesive group as they went along. Thankfully, a lot of smart computer-y type people are doing a lot of excellent work building up a taxonomic catalog and making it readable on the internet, for both people, and computers (see BioNames, and the Encyclopedia of Life for nice, graphical representations of these ever-growing lists), but it’s still a very, very long ways from being comprehensive and “done”.
Anyways, all of this is to say that there is probably a species out there that has a specific epithet that’s very close to your name, but it just might not have made it onto the list yet, which is why I got Anyphaena mogan (a type of spider) as my name, even though I literally have a species named after me (Pelecinobaccha morgani, a flower fly named by a friend of mine in Brazil; very large PDF available for free here if you want to read about it).
Regardless, it’s still a super-cool application & kudos to Jofre Espigule for making it!
