SHORTEST AND LONGEST SCIENTIFIC NAMES

As a follow-up to my previous post ("Humorous Scientific Names"), I decided to do a post on the shortest and longest scientific names.

The shortest genus names consist of only two letters. There are at least five examples:

Ba—a land snail in the Fiji Islands (see my last post)

Ia—a bat in SE Asia

Io—a pulmonate river snail from the eastern United States

Ja—a blind carabid bettle from a cave in southern Japan

Yi—a bat-like dinosaur from China

Note: As of early 2022, the internet mentions only Ia and Yi.

The above two images show the front (apertural) and back views of a specimen of  Io fluvialis, a modern-day freshwater pleuroceridae gastropod from Cinninnati, Ohio. This specimen has a height of 35 (mm = 1 3/8 inches).

The shortest complete scientific names (genus and species) have only two letters. There are at least two examples:

Ia io Thomas, 1902—a southeast Asian bat

Yi qi Xu et al., 2015—a Chinese dinosaur.

The longest complete scientific name (genus and species) is 42 characters.  It is:

Parastratiosphecomyia stratiosphereomyioides—a small fly found in Thailand and India.