An eyeless, cave-dwelling arachnid species recently
discovered by Brazilian scientists has been named “Smeagol” in honour of
a character in J.R.R. Tolkien’s
Lord of the Rings
, the Sao Paulo State Research Foundation said.
Iandumoema smeagol
belongs to the opiliones (harvestmen) order of the arachnid class,
distant relatives of spiders but different from them due to the lack of
narrow waists and poison glands.
Smeagol is the third
species of Iandumoema found in the world and is different from the two
others, also cave dwellers, because of the absence of eyes, said the
foundation, which funded the research.
Scientist is Tolkien fan
The new opilione species was officially described in an article published by the scientific journal
ZooKeys
and authored by biologists Ricardo Pinto da Rocha, Rafael Fonseca
Ferreira and Maria Elina Bichuette, of Sao Carlos Federal University and
the University of Sao Paulo. “I love
The Lord of the Rings
. I read the novel before watching the movies. I always wanted to give
an animal the name of one of the saga’s characters,” Bichuette said in a
statement.
In the Tolkien saga, Smeagol is the
hobbit who finds the world’s most powerful ring and under the object’s
spell hides for years in a cave, developing big eyes to see in the dark
and becoming known as Gollum. — IANS
Source :- THe Hindu, 27-Nov-2015
No comments:
Post a Comment