To the Rescue of Goliath
Suppose you are a Goliath bird-eating spider, the largest known spider on earth, now or ever. Imagine your chagrin when in 1980 an amateur collector in Argentina finds a fossil declared by experts to be that of a spider nearly three times as large. They give this misbegotten piece of rock the grand title of Megarachne -- giant spider -- and you are left in distant second place.
You seethe in malice for 25 years and it seems no one cares. But then, who should come riding to your rescue but Paul Selden. Yes, Paul Selden no less, the president of the International Society of Arachnology. Dr. Selden has doubted from Day 1 that Megarachne was a true spider. Recently a second Megarachne-like fossil was discovered at the same site in Argentina as the first. Dr. Selden, an expert on fossil arthropods at the University of Manchester, was invited to compare the two.
His suspicions were immediately confirmed. On seeing the impostor's cuticular mucrones and raised lunules, he reports in Biology Letters, he recognized it as not a spider but a eurypterid, and a rather puny one at that. Eurypterids were highly aggressive marine scorpions, some more than six feet long, that in their long ago heyday killed just about anything they wanted to.
So now your rightful position as biggest thing on the World Wide Web has been restored. But wait, there is a fly in the ointment. You would like the title of Megarachne for yourself, or at the least for Dr. Selden to strip it from the usurper. But he refuses!
'Although its name is anomalous, it has to keep it,' he said of the fossil nonspider. Under zoological rules of nomenclature, names cannot be taken back.
'Even if you find a bird and call it a horse, it can't be changed,' Dr. Selden avers. The only way out is if he should judge that Megarachne belongs to some already named species of eurypterid such as Woodwardopterus, a step he is not yet prepared to take.
It's more than enough to send you into a deep, bleak, bird-crunching rampage.