“The means for ascertaining or confirming the etymologies of many scientific names are, perhaps, not available for all who might desire to ascertain them, and they are often wrongly analyzed.”
Theodore Gill, “Fishes Living and Fossil.” Science. N.S. 3 (78): 909‒917.
Naturalists have been naming animals with Latin or Latinized epithets long before Linnaeus formalized zoological nomenclature with his Systema Naturae (10th ed.) in 1758. Following Linnaeus’ binomial (genus and species) system, over 10,400 genus-group names and over 61,000 species-group names have been proposed for Recent fishes, with over 5,200 and 35,900 of these names, respectively, regarded as taxonomically valid today. But as Smithsonian zoologist Theodore Gill remarked back in 1896, the precise meanin