Thursday, April 14, 2005

Slime-mold Beetles Named for Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld

My cousin, Bruce, sent me this article. It's the best story of the week, or as I like to call it: "if the shoe fits..."


From Yahoo:

Slime-mold Beetles Named for Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld

Namesakes of the U.S. President and two of his key people might be crawling around your back yard as you read this.

Three new beetles of the genus Agathidium have been named after members of the current administration: A. bushi, A. cheneyi and A. rumsfeldi.

Two former Cornell University entomologists, Quentin Wheeler and Kelly Miller, were in charge of naming 65 new species of slime-mold beetles, which they discovered while studying the insects' evolution and classification.

Wheeler, who is now head of entomology at the Natural History Museum in London, said that the choice to name beetles after President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was out of admiration for their principles, not because they look like the beetles.


(I don't buy that last part.)

1 comment:

Snave said...

The only thing better than naming slime beetles for those guys would have been dung beetles, or maybe slime mold!