Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Trish Khan, the Milwaukee County Zoo's curator of primates and small mammals, has worked at the zoo for more than 30 years, and in ...

Animal names usually fall into one of two categories. There are the simple, familiar ones we all know—African elephant, common dolphin, brown bear. Or their scientific names, if you want to get ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Q. I notice you sometimes include scientific names of animals in your columns. One time you identified a timber rattlesnake; ...

Many scientific names acknowledge some distinctive aspect of a plant or animal. For example, the scientific name for the Alabama waterdog, an aquatic, flat-tailed salamander native to the Black ...

Be it bird, fish, or animal, every single breathing creature is born with a name. While some names are normal and socially ...

Animal names often sound precise, but many are the result of early guesswork that never got corrected. Explorers, naturalists, and translators labeled creatures based on appearance or limited ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I write about biodiversity and the hidden quirks of the natural world. Scientists estimate there are over 8 million animal species ...

Trish Khan, the Milwaukee County Zoo's curator of primates and small mammals, has worked at the zoo for more than 30 years, and in that time, methods for naming animals have changed. "It used to be a ...

Animal names often say more about the people who coined them than the creatures themselves. Early explorers, sailors, traders, and scientists relied on first impressions, loose comparisons, and ...