Recently, we learned that a newly discovered type of snake was named after Indiana Jones. Well, after the actor who portrayed him. Now, we’ve got that topped. Because that’s just one snake after all. Thanks to the folks at Gizmodo, we’ve learned that Brazilian scientists from the Emilio Goeldi Paraense Museum have found three new species of spiders, which they are naming after the “Big Three” of Enterprise bridge crews from Star Trek—Captain James T. Kirk, Mister Spock, and Doctor Leonard “Bones” McCoy. The spiders belong to the Roddenberry genus, which is of course named after Star Trek’s creator Gene Roddenberry.
The scientists discovered these spiders across different locations in Latin America. They found R. kirk in Costa Rica, while they discovered R. spock in Campeche, Mexico, and R. mccoy in Big California Sur, also in Mexico. Co-authors Alexander Sánchez-Ruiz and Alexandre B. Bonaldo identified both a male and female specimen of the spider R. kirk. However, they only discovered a female R. spock and male R. mccoy. Unlike Indiana Jones, they named these spiders after the characters, not the actors. So no R. shatner or R. nimoy in this bunch, sadly.
The original Star Trek series inspired researchers after noticing how the arachnid anatomy resembled that of various starships seen in the iconic franchise. We’re not really sure we see that ourselves at all. Maybe the Enterprise saucer section a bit? But we guess they kind of look like some Klingon ships we’ve seen in the series. We bet these scientists were just super big Star Trek fans, and wanted to immortalize their favorite characters for eternity. We can’t say we blame them. Hey, maybe they discover some new species as time goes on, and we got a few spiders with names like R. uhura, R. sulu, R. scotty, and R. chekov. Get the whole Enterprise bridge crew their own arachnid counterparts.
