Reference Pages: References Further Information Acknowledgements Newest Entries

General

• For a collection of hundreds of related links, organized and annotated, see Zoological Record: Systematics, taxonomy, & nomenclature.
• The All Species Toolkit, a database containing over 870,000 species.
• World Biodiversity Database, a taxonomic database and information system which aims to document all known species. In many cases, it includes information such as description, range, and genome.
• Species 2000 has the objective of enumerating all known species.
• NCBI's Taxonomy Resources, references and on-line resources used by the Taxonomy group at GenBank.
• International Plant Name Index Query

Nomenclature

• For a good introduction to zoological nomenclature, see Gary Rosenberg's Naming Names.
• For a tutorial on botanical nomenclature, see A Guide to Botanical Nomenclature: A Tennessee Tutorial.
• Nomenclatural Glossary for Zoology.
• Perspectives on Binomial Names of Virus Species by M.H.V van Regenmortel.
• Nomenclature of monoclonal antibodies.

Other articles and collections of curious names

• Clever gene names.
• FlyNome, "A database of Drosophila nomenclature," tells the stories behind Drosophila gene names.
• Doug Yanega's home page.
• Arnold Menke's Funny or curious zoological names.
• Molecules with Silly or Unusual Names collects curiosities of chemical names.
• A Fly Called Iyaiyai, an article from Science News, May 26, 2001, by Susan Milius.
• Richard Conniff's "What's in a Name?," Smithsonian Magazine, December 1996. Its abstract is on the web.
• Warner Brother's pseudo-Latin names of Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote.

Biological Etymologies

• Donald J. Borror's Dictionary of Word Roots and Combining Forms (Mayfield Publishing, Mountain View, CA, 1960) is quite a useful reference to many of the elements which make up more mundane scientific names.
• Tim Williams' A Dictionary of the Roots and Combining Forms of Scientific Words (Lulu Press, 2005). A correspondent tells me that this is more complete than Borror's work. I have not seen it myself.
• Biographical Etymology of Marine Organism Names (BEMON) gives biographies of people whom marine organisms are named after.
• Names of the Reptiles and Amphibians of North America has translations and etymologies for damn near all of them, with bibliographic and myth notes on the people and figures from mythology that are sources for names.
• Dictionary of Botanical Epithets.
• Etymologies of Bacteria Names (in French)

Other Related Links

• For an extensive and growing list and description of biodiversity, organized in the context of the evolutionary tree, see The Tree of Life.
• List of Bacterial Names with Standing in Nomenclature lists valid bacterial names. See also its Definitions and Abbreviations for an index of rules for bacterial nomenclature.
• Down with species, a brief article about a proposal to replace Linnaean taxonomy with one based on "Least-inclusive taxonomic units."
• Alroy, John, 2002. How many named species are valid? PNAS 99: 3706-3711. (". . . 24-31% of currently accepted names eventually will prove invalid. . . .")
• Biopat allows you to buy the privelege of naming a newly discovered species yourself. (The ICZN denounces it as a "striking departure from scientific tradition" that would "irreversibly obscure science and hinder conservation efforts.")
• Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature

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© 2002-2008 Mark Isaak. All rights reserved.