Thousands of plants and animals are named after a place. Do they actually live there? I matched 2,901 of them to millions of biodiversity records. Mostly they do. But the coco de mer, named for the Maldives, grows in the Seychelles, and a bird named for South America lives in Java.

Scientific names are full of places. There is a japonica for almost every Japanese plant you can think of, frogs named after mountains, beetles after provinces and moths after towns. The rule of thumb is simple: a species is usually named after the place its first specimen came from. So you would expect it to live there. But naturalists make mistakes, specimens get mixed up on long voyages, borders move, and once a name is published it sticks, however wrong it turns out to be.

Wikidata, the open database behind Wikipedia, records for some species what their name commemorates. Leaving out duplicates and names that honour ships or universities, I found 2,901 species and subspecies named after a place with coordinates, and asked the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), which pools records from museums, herbaria and citizen science around the world, where each one has been recorded.

Mostly, they live there

Many species are known from a handful of specimens, so I could only test 1,210 plants, animals and fungi. Of those, 98% have at least one record in the country of the place they are named after, 88% have most of their records there, and 70% have never been recorded anywhere else. That is less of a triumph than it sounds: the specimen a species was named from is often in GBIF itself, so one record at home is easy. But it does mean the names are, on the whole, honest.

The misnamed

29 have at least five records and none in their namesake’s country. I checked every case by hand. My first pass found 53, but 24 of those were mistakes in the data rather than in the names: the same species entered twice under an old and a new name, regions such as Macedonia or Africa pinned on a single country, synonyms that hold only a sliver of a species’ records, and links to the wrong place altogether. A kangaroo rat from Baja California was linked to the island of Trinidad, and a fruit fly called montana, “of the mountains”, to the state of Montana. I removed or corrected all of those.

What is left includes some famous misnomers. The coco de mer, Lodoicea maldivica, the palm with the biggest seed in the world, was named for the Maldives, where Portuguese sailors found its nuts washed ashore and assumed that was where they grew. It grows wild only in the Seychelles, and 292 of its 301 GBIF records are there.

The Javan banded pitta (Pitta guajana in GBIF, Hydrornis guajanus in most bird lists) carries the name of the Guianas in South America, because an early description put it there; 301 of its 353 records are in Indonesia. The Central Asian salamander, Ranodon sibiricus, is named for Siberia but lives in the mountains of Kazakhstan and western China, and its original type locality is thought to be a mistake.

Most of the rest are not misnomers but gaps in the records. The Guinea worm, Dracunculus medinensis, is the “little dragon from Medina”; it was once common in Arabia, but is now close to eradicated and GBIF holds no Saudi records. Elephas melitensis, an extinct dwarf elephant, lived on Malta, but its 31 GBIF fossil records are all from Sicily. Bradgatia linfordensis, a fossil more than 550 million years old from Charnwood Forest in Leicestershire, is recorded in GBIF only from Newfoundland. Others sit just over a border: a mullein named for Edirne in Turkey is recorded just across the border in Greece and Bulgaria, but not in Turkey.

The coco de mer was named for the Maldives, where its nuts washed up. It grows only in the Seychelles.

Fungi and microbes wander

Reptiles, insects and spiders are the most faithful: 98%, 100% and 98% are recorded at home. Birds are recorded at home 98% of the time, but only 69% have most of their records there, because birdwatchers log widespread species everywhere. Fungi (81%) and microbes (66%) do worst: Aspergillus egyptiacus, a fungus first described in Egypt, has 393 GBIF records, 297 of them in Australia and none in Egypt, and many microbe records are strains kept in laboratories far from home.

Anglica, scotica, hibernica

Most species named for a place say so in Latin rather than in Wikidata. I listed 202 Latin place adjectives and found 61,815 species ending in one. I checked every British and Irish one with a GBIF key, and a random sample of up to 40 for each of the other adjectives, weighted back up to the full list. About 91% of the non-British ones are recorded in their place, but only 81% of the British ones, from 90% for britannica down to 61% for hibernica (where I only count the Republic).

Some are proper puzzles. Robertus scoticus, a small “Scottish” spider, has 1,892 GBIF records, from Finland, Norway and Sweden, and none from Britain. Others only look British: Chrysoblephus anglicus is a South African sea bream, known locally as the Englishman, and Urophyllum britannicum is recorded only in Papua New Guinea, home of the island of New Britain.

How I did this

From Wikidata I took every species and subspecies with a “named after” link to a place with coordinates, its country, and its GBIF identifier. For each one I asked GBIF how many records with coordinates it holds, how many in each country, and the box that encloses them. A species counts as recorded at home if any record is in its namesake’s country (including overseas territories GBIF lists separately, such as French Guiana, and every country of a region that spans borders), and as missing if it has at least five records and none there. Records under a synonym can show that a species is at home but not that it is absent, so those cases are left untested. Besides every case of a missing species, I checked by hand a random 30 of those recorded at home, and every name whose Latin does not echo its namesake: 58 links in all turned out to point at the wrong thing, often a person or a common name (the Bermuda grass, the Key lime), and are left out. On the interactive page you can tap any dot to see the species, its records and the box around them.

The caveats matter. GBIF is a record of where people have looked and shared data, heavily skewed towards Europe, North America and Australia. A single type specimen can make a species look at home, while missing records say little. A country is a blunt unit: a species named for Siberia passes if it is recorded anywhere in Russia. Records at sea count for a country only when GBIF places them in its waters, and namesakes out at sea or in Antarctica cannot be tested at all. The boxes are cruder still, and Wikidata’s links are patchy and, as above, sometimes wrong. So treat any single species as a lead to follow up, not a verdict.

Notes and sources

• Taxa and their namesakes: Wikidata (CC0). Occurrence counts, range boxes and classification: GBIF.org APIs, 2026; only aggregated counts are shared.
• Coco de mer history: Guillemette Crouzet (2024), The forbidden fruit of paradise?, Capasia; Ranodon type locality: D. R. Frost, Amphibian Species of the World; Guinea worm name: Etymologia, Emerging Infectious Diseases 22(8), 2016.
• On GBIF’s biases: Beck and others (2014), Ecological Informatics 19, 10 to 15; Meyer, Weigelt and Kreft (2016), Ecology Letters 19(8), 992 to 1006.
• I wrote the text, with drafting and editing assistance from Claude (Anthropic), which also helped prepare the analysis code. I reviewed and checked all text and results.