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The Eponym Dictionary of Reptiles. B. Beolens, M. Watson, and M. Grayson. 2011. Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 9781421401355. 296 p. $100.00 (hardcover).With its emphasis on succinctness, precision, and logic, scientific literature provides little scope for revealing an author's personality. Only article titles and acknowledgments reveal such glimpses in most scientific disciplines. Taxonomic papers, however, provide a third area for personality to shine through, in the etymology of the created names. Many such names reflect aspects of the organism as seen through the prism of the author's mind. In other cases, species are named after people, usually real, but sometimes mythical or fictional. Sadly, while the people behind such eponyms are familiar to the authors themselves, and often to a wider range of people of that generation, with time the people concerned often fade into obscurity together with the papers themselves. Instead, subsequent generations of researchers and the non-professional community experience the names as seen in field guides, or in recent times the Web, leaving the reader to wonder who were the Storer and DeKay of Storeria dekayi and the Xantus and Rivers of Xantusia riversiana, and what their connections with the species were.
This book, a mammoth undertaking, provides readers with some of this information. It is the third foray by the authors into this field, with previous similar books on birds (Beolens and Watkins, 2003) and mammals (Beolens et al., 2009), and I believe a fourth volume on amphibians is in preparation. The coverage is extensive, with 4173 taxa (generic and/or specific names) representing 2330 people. Vernacular names are also covered. In most cases these vernacular names, generally coined by others subsequent to the original taxon description, either reflect the binomen itself (e.g., Jameson's Mamba, Demirosaspis jamesoni) or the author of the binomen (e.g., Boulenger's Legless Skink, Typhlosaurus vermis, described by Boulenger). In a few cases, the vernacular eponym does not reflect the original eponym (e.g., Boulenger's Bow-fingered Gecko, Cyrtodactylus loriae Boulenger, 1897), which can lead to momentary confusion, although such names are covered under both eponyms.
The authors have obtained their binomial eponyms largely from the Reptile Database maintained by the J. Craig Venter Institute (www.reptile-database.org). I noticed relatively few omissions. Among the Australopapuan fauna, with which I am most familiar, omissions...