On the right is Skeletor, the main villain on the cartoon
He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. On the left is
Maratus skeletus,
a species of peacock spider named in his honor. Madeline Girard, a
graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley, discovered
it and another that she calls "Sparklemuffin" in Australia. How did she
come up the names?
Girard explains in an interview for the blog of Berkeley's Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management:
Searching
for and catching spiders feels a little bit like a game; my colleague
and I started joking that it felt like we were playing Pokémon! Our
first brainstorms with these two new species were trying to play off of
that. We didn’t come up with a good Pokémon reference, but “Skeletorus”
came up because the spider is black with white lines resembling a
skeleton (and we liked the subtle reference to Skeletor from Masters of
the Universe!). Sparklemuffin just kind of popped up one day. We wanted
something a little bit glamorous, which led to sparkle…and muffin works
because the shape of the spider (which is more narrow at the interior of
the abdomen and then puffs out at the top) sort of resembles a muffin
top. It started as our nickname, but people really love the name and it
has made the species really popular!
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