Villainous Game of Thrones Night King gets insect named after him
Meet the new species of winter bee fly inspired by the creepy leader of the White Walkers.
Paramonovius nightking is named after the Night King from Game of Thrones.
HBO's hit fantasy series Game of Thrones may have ended, but at least one character will live on forever in the insect world. Meet Paramonovius nightking, a new species of winter bee fly Australian researchers named after the Night King.
The bee fly (a fly that looks like a bee) dwells in a small area of Western Australia and is around a centimeter (less than half an inch) long.
Paramonovius nightking, which is detailed in the Austral Entomology science journal, was named after the Night King because it reigns in Australia's winter season and has a crown of spine-like hairs. It's one of 230 new species named by Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization during the past year, according to CSIRO.
Check out some of the 230+ new species we've named at @CSIROnews in the past year! #CSIROCollections #taxonomy #scicomm @australtaxonomy https://t.co/SYpGPe3Tj3 pic.twitter.com/adlZpGwrTD
— Dr Bryan Lessard (@BrytheFlyGuy) July 1, 2019
The name was chosen by Game of Thrones fan Xuankun Li, a Ph.D. student at the Australian National Insect Collection in Canberra.
"It has a serious side, but naming new species is the most fun a taxonomist can have," Bryan Lessard, entomologist at CSIRO's National Research Collections Australia, said in a statement.
Other new species mentioned by CSIRO include a cusk eel named Barathronus algrahami, a small soldier fly named Prosopochrysa lemannae and another soldier fly named Scutellumina parvatra.
"Scientists across the country name around 1,000 new species each year," Lessard added. "At the current rate it will take another 350 years just to know what exists."
