The Horseshoe Leatherjacket is sometimes called the Purple People Eater. Not 100% sure where that name comes from, but I suspect it's from a song of the same name which describes a monster with 'one long horn and one big eye', so the leatherjacket probably gets this name from its patterning resembling an eye (one big eye) and the dorsal spine (one long horn).
I could go on and on about how confusing the names of many felids are. Perhaps the one that frustrates me the most is the fact there's an animal called a "leopard cat" because a leopard is literally already a type of cat. In a similar vein, the name clouded leopard and snow leopard makes me mad because it implies that they are types of leopards, when they are in fact their own species. The name "mountain lion" makes me mad for the same reason. Also the fact that African golden cats and Asian golden cats are not even in the same lineage, but are named as if they were just different subspecies of one species. Another misnomer in the cat family is "jungle cat" since that species is really not even a jungle-dwelling animal. Anyways I know it doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things but I get very heated about this.
Hence, the Jungle Cat is often now called the Swamp Cat. Don’t forget, there’s the Sunda Clouded Leopard, which is distinct from the species often simply called the “Clouded Leopard”. The latter is sometimes known as the Mainland Clouded Leopard.
Yeah, I much prefer swamp cat for that species. I don't mind both Neofelis species being called clouded leopards (except for the problems I already have with the name clouded leopard already) because clouded leopard could be used to refer to a genus rather than a species (Idk how to word this hopefully it makes sense). I do wish that N.nebulosa had a common name that differentiated it from N. diardi. I do try to use "mainland clouded leopard" when I'm referring to N. nebulosa specifically.
A lot of this occurs because names were decided well before the modern day phylogeny was understood. It'd be difficult to change the hundreds of common names that are frequently used and "technically" not correct, although in some cases this has happened (such as replacing the name "bear-sloth" with sloth bear).
My favourite name is the Small Giant Clam (Tridacna maxima). It is also known as the Maxima Clam, but I prefer the former, because who doesn't love a self-contradictory animal name?
To add to that, Prionailurus bengalensis, the one and only Leopard Cat is sometimes known (especially in the context of its hybrids with domestic cats, for some reason) by the name of “Asian Leopard Cat”, when there is no “African Leopard Cat”, for example. Along those lines, several passerine species have “root” common names that are already unique, but these names often have unnecessary qualifiers attached: Black-capped Donacobius, Bornean Bristlehead, Broad-billed Sapayoa, Grey Hypocolius, Mottled Berryhunter, Spotted Elachura, Wattled Ploughbill.
In my quest to see all of the world’s bird families, I have seen 5 of these; still need a Berryhunter and an Elachura.
We’ve all heard about that one bee in Chile named after Charizard and those three Australian beetles named after Articuno, Zapdos, and Moltres, right? Well, there’s a new insect named after a Pokémon in town, and its name is Nocticola pheromosa!!!! Team led by Filipino entomologist discovers new cockroach now named after a Pokémon
Yeah, right, and the agnostid known as Han solo was named for the Chinese ethnic group and for being the only known member of its family at its time, and not after the Star Wars character.
Christian Kammerer (one of the Bulbasaurus’s discoverers) has said that he named the creature after its bulbous nostrils, and that any similarities to Bulbasaur were a coincidence. But he might’ve been being coy about it. Heck, the species name “Phylloxyron” translates to “leaf razor”, which Kammerer claims is a reference to the beast’s leaf-shearing beak, but we all know what move that refers to, right?
