Friday, August 27, 2010

Leviathan = Livyatan


I'm very late to the party here, but in case you weren't aware, that big raptorial whale that was discovered two months ago, originally named Leviathan, has been renamed Livyatan because the original name was found to be a junior synonym of Mammut, which sucks. To be fair, the name Livyatan conjured up much the same image: it's the Hebrew name applied to large marine monsters. Doesn't quite have the same ring to it, but hey.

2 comments:

Questioning said...

Agreed it sucks. I had a bit of a rant about it over at Brian Switek's new blog home.

http://brianswitek.com/2010/08/fossil-bonanza-in-australian-cave-documents-the-growth-of-a-prehistoric-marsupial/#comments

There are so many "classic" names that we should try to recover is my personal feeling. Of course that doesn't mean anything.

Oh, and I'm loving the Word Verification of the day, "styme"

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/stymie

David Marjanović said...

It's the exact same word in a spelling that is closer to the pronunciation.