Cthulhu Lives In The Gut Of A Termite
The Dread Cthulhu WikipediaAs well as in the malevolent deeps Scientists have been naming species after famous people for a long time. For example, Thomas Jefferson has an extinct giant ground sloth named after him. Mark Knopfler rates a dinosaur. Frank Zappa has multiple animals sharing his namesake, including a spider, a jellyfish and a mudskipper. Now joining those hallowed ranks is one of the Great Old Ones. Scientists at the University of British Columbia and the University of Florida bequeathed two new genera of symbiotic protists their own dread names: Cthulhu and Cthylla. The protists, not surprisingly, have a lot of tentacles (or, well, tentacle-like appendages. In fact, if they didn't have tentacle-like appendages, I would have been writing this column berating the researchers for their oversight). But, as the researchers say in the abstract to their paper, published in PLOS One: "Both genera have […] an anterior bundle flagella...