By Susan Milius
One of the most passionately disputed arguments over a scientific name has finally come to an end. After 200 years of ambiguity, years of fierce debate and a record number of formal comments on the proposed name, a commission has declared gigantea the one true species term for the Aldabra giant tortoises.
That species descriptor will be used as part of a two-word Latin name that puts the species into a genus with its near relatives. Meet Aldabrachelys gigantea.
“Taxonomy is a swirling, dynamic science,” says malacologist Ellinor Michel, executive secretary of the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature, which holds the final authority in the naming of animals. Name debates, she notes, can get “fractious.”