So here’s a question: why are animals called what they are?
I’m not talking about the big categorical names– things like ‘dog’ and ‘cat’ and ‘horse’ go back for hundreds of years, according to etymology. But when you want to get more specific than that, things get a little wonky.
Let’s talk fossils and dinosaurs: if you’re thinking about the long-necked behemoth, LittleFoot from Don Bluth fame, you’re probably thinking about a brontosaurus– except, as pedants in any natural history museum used to be quick to tell you, brontosaurus didn’t actually exist.
According to an article by Emily Osterloff on the Natural History Museum website,
“The first recorded evidence of Brontosaurus was discovered in the 1870s in the USA. But by the early 1900s, scientists had started to question whether the fossils used to name Brontosaurus actually came from another dinosaur, the remarkably similar Apatosaurus.
Due to the rules of scientific naming – the first name published gets priority – Brontosaurus was relegated to scientific history and the fossils reassigned to Apatosaurus.”
But remember that I said pedants used to be big on this subject? Turns out, even fossilized facts are subject to change. Osterloff continues:
“That was until a study in 2015 unexpectedly found evidence that Brontosaurus was distinct from Apatosaurus all along, signaling the reinstated status of this iconic dinosaur.”
This plays on an established rule in the paleontological world: the earliest name for the fossil is what gets to stay. And that’s all well and good for creatures whose existence predates humans by eons.
What about the ones that are living side-by-side with humans?
Here’s where things get political again, particularly when we talk about species native to colonized places.
The thing about colonizers is that they tend to suddenly come into contact with a lot of unfamiliar things. Sometimes they’ll ask the indigenous peoples of the area what the heck those weird-looking animals are called (where we get words like condor, kangaroo, and koala, from Quechua, Guugu Yimidhirr, and Dharug, respectively). Other times, they’ll either neglect to ask the name or ignore it altogether, and instead refer to it as something similar they remember from home, as is the case with robins. According to Kenn Kaufman at Audobon.org:
“When English-speaking explorers and colonists began traveling the world, they applied the name Robin to anything that reminded them of the familiar bird from home. Our American Robin really isn’t similar, aside from having orange on the chest; it’s twice the size and four times the bulk of the European bird, and these days it isn’t even classified in the same family. Neither are the Australasian robins (family Petroicidae), more than 50 species of small, sharply patterned birds found from New Guinea to Australia and New Zealand. Various robin-chats in Africa and robins in Asia are at least placed in the same family as the European Robin, but they’re not all closely related. But none of that really matters; it’s a good name, and we can sort out any possible confusion by looking at the scientific names.”
And other times entirely, the species they come across are named to honor someone and something. And as with place names, the choice of who gets honored by that kind of name can be fraught.
Take for example the ʻaoʻū, previously called the Christmas shearwater, a bird native to the shores of Hawai’i– the defunct name seems rather bizarre, considering that Christmas was a tradition that was completely nonexistent in Hawaii before the late 1700s. Meanwhile the current name ties into the language and traditions of the Hawaiian people, and is itself descriptive: According to a press release from the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, “The name ʻaoʻū was chosen for the Christmas shearwater based its call, where the sound ʻao is repeated six times followed by a long ʻū sound. “ʻAo” means a new shoot, leaf, or bud, especially of taro, and “ao” also refers to clouds, the light of day or daylight as well as enlightened; to regain consciousness. ʻŪ means to growl, grunt, groan, moan, sigh, hum, coo; to hold the breath. Naming birds from their sound is a common practice for many sea and shorebirds in Hawaiʻi.”
Another push toward decolonizing birds in particular has come in the wake of a highly publicized 2020 incident involving birdwatcher Christian Cooper, which sparked conversations about racial bias and its intersection with the (stereotypically very white) field of birdwatching– and in this case, how discouraging it can be for birdwatchers of color such as Cooper to realize just how many of the birds they love are named for slaveholders and white supremacists.
The Ad Hoc Committee on English Bird Names for the American Ornithologists’ Union is opting to move on from person-based naming conventions entirely and move toward more intuitive and descriptive names. “They imply possession of a species,” explained committee co-chair Erica Nol, who went on to point out the intrinsic bias within those names that are given: “They are overwhelmingly from a particular time and social fabric, they are almost all White men, few women, and women were almost all first names.”
There’s some pushback, of course– like with places, there are a lot of people pointing to history, and to habit, and to the inconvenience of renaming these creatures.
But in the end, what we call a thing is a choice, and what choice we make speaks volumes about what we value.
This is the third installment of a four-part series on choosing names and why they matter.
Part 1: A Person by Any Other Name
Part 2: Politics of Place
Part 3: A Take on Taxonomy
Part 4: Imaginary Worlds
JWTroemner.com 
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