Costello's Booby (1 Viewer)

Believe it or not, there appears to be a taxon of Papasula abbotti called Costello's Booby from the Marquesas Islands. This glories in the scientific name of Papasula abbotti costelloi.

Unfortunately it appears to be following in the footseps of the Norwegian Blue Parrot.

I wonder if it ever met the Wolfman3

David

Ridgway named the booby after Dr. William Louis Abbott not William Alexander “Bud” Abbott (October 2, 1895 – April 24, 1974). The advance sheets of Ridgway’s paper Descriptions of some new birds collected on the islands of Aldabra and Assumption, Northwest of Madagascar by Dr. W. L. Abbott were published on August 16th 1893, two years prior to Bud Abbott being born. A native of Philadelphia, William Louis Abbott (1860-1936) was educated at the University of Pennsylvania (A.B., 1881; M.D., 1884). He continued his medical education in England, attaining Licentiates from the Royal College of Surgeons and the Royal College of Physicians. Upon receiving his inheritance, however, Abbott left the practice of medicine forever, and from then on indulged his avocation for travel and the study of natural history. Abbott had already made collections of birds in Cuba and Santo Domingo in 1883. In December 1894 Abbott left Kashmir for Madagascar in order to enlist with the native "Hova" army during the Malagasy resistance to the second French occupation of the island. The hostility between the United States and Spain caused Abbott's return home in 1898, and he was wounded slightly while serving as a volunteer in Cuba. William Louis Abbott was, in the words of a contemporary, "one of the greatest field naturalists America has produced." Although he did not engage in taxonomic analysis, his collecting activities were unparalleled in extent and scope, making available for study by Smithsonian naturalists plants, land shells, ethnological material, and vertebrates of all classes, but particularly birds and small mammals. Abbott donated more than 10,000 of the latter. Species described as new number 462, and more than twenty bear his name. Perhaps no other single collector provided as much for the Smithsonian Institution. I have not been able to read the paper that named the extinct subspecies costelloi but in a book by the senior author of the paper David W. Steadman (Extinction and Biogeography of Tropical Pacific Birds) he gives the English name of Papasula abbotti costelloi as Abbott & Costello’s Booby, page 521. If he named it after a scientist or explorer or collector would not he have named it Costello’s Booby? For the young or non-North American and especially for the young and non-North American I present Abbott & Costello:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sShMA85pv8M .