Gollum, foetid dung and a cute chick
Posted 7 January 2008 // Carl Walrond
Morepork chick
Gollum is fading from public memory but lives on in The Bush – the third theme of Te Ara, launched on 24 September 2007. A small endemic fish, the Gollum galaxias (Galaxias gollumoides) was discovered on Stewart Island in the 1990s and is featured in the Freshwater fish entry. New to science, it was so named for its bug eyes – a characteristic of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the rings character, Gollum – and a trait shared with this morepork chick from the Birds of prey entry.
Another interestingly named species is stinkwood (Coprosma foetidissima). The genus Coprosma was coined by German scientists Johann Reinhold Forster and son Georg in 1776. As the plant ‘stank very violently,’ they derived a name from the Latin ‘copros’ (dung) and ‘foetidus’ (strong-smelling). (J. R. Forster was the German naturalist of James Cook’s second voyage to New Zealand, who ‘drove everybody almost frantic with irritation’, according to J. C. Beaglehole.)
New Zealand scientists could do worse than look at Mark Isaak’s Curiosities of Biological Nomenclature for inspiration when naming new species. It features the beetle Agra cadabra and spider Apopyllus now.
