Inspired by the recent feature at Atlas Obscura (“Zoology’s Favorite Hoax”), we are delighted to share this excerpt from The Art of Naming which describes the full and bizarre history of the naming of the imaginary species of rhinogrades or snouters.
One of the most wonderful and endearing classics in imaginary species diversity are the rhinogrades or snouters, members of Rhinogradentia, a fictitious order of mammal described in 1961 in an eighty-page book released by the esteemed scientific publishing house Gustav Fischer Verlag, Stuttgart. The author is Dr. Harald Stümpke, a pseudonym for University of Karls ruhe zoology professor Gerolf Steiner. His book, The Snouters: Form and Life of the Rhinogrades , has appeared in many editions and languages, including a 1967 translation into English. Snouters were incredibly popular among biologists in the 1960s and found their way into various other textbooks.
For instance, they’re included as their own order of mammal — just after rodents — in Rolf Siewing’s Zoology Primer , a systematic volume formatted according to the standards of the field. A short sentence stating that the animal’s existence was widely doubted, despite Stümpke’s book, is the only explicit reference to the rhinogrades’ constructed character.
Steiner (a.k.a. Stümpke) was inspired by a poem by Christian Morgenstern, whom Steiner credited with having made early reference to this unknown group of animals he called nasobames:
Along on its probosces there goes the nasobame
accompanied by its young one.
It is not found in Brehm,
It is not found in Meyer,
Nor in the Brockhaus anywhere.
’Twas only through my lyre
we knew it had been there.
Thenceforth on its probosces
(above I’ve said the same)
accompanied by its offspring
there goes the nasobame.
In truly amusing attention to detail and using what is immediately recognizable as a practiced scientific patois, Steiner exhaustively outlines the story of the animals’ discovery, their geographic distribution and embryonic development, and their extinction following nuclear weapons testing in the (likewise invented) Hy-yi-yi Archipelago. The snouters’ grim atomic obliteration, which came shortly after Stümpke’s purported visit to the islands, was fitting for the time. In 1961, a good decade had passed since the end of World War II and the first use of nuclear weapons against Japan. The fear of further atomic conflict was a prime component of the Cold War, which defined the global politics of the time. Given the context, it comes as no surprise that the Liberal Democratic Party of Germany took Steiner’s zoological humoresque at face value; in the Liberal Democratic Newspaper , distributed primarily in East Germany from 1945 to 1990, the party reported that the wonderfully strange animal world of Hy-yi-yi would have survived, “had we, the peaceable powers, managed in time to implement widespread disarmament and prohibit the production and testing of nuclear weapons.”
Most of Stümpke’s monograph, however, is dedicated to the systematics and taxonomy of the rhinogrades, and the author shines here. With great precision, he creates an inherently consistent image of a species-rich animal group, complete with internal genealogical order.
The diversity of scientific names that Stümpke coined is truly remarkable. He wrote perfect descriptions for 15 families, 26 genera, and 138 species. However, the names are clearly not from the pen of one versed in classical languages, a point that led renowned evolutionary and systematic biologist George Gaylord Simpson to write a review of the book in Science . Although he considered the rhinogrades “the most startling zoological event so far in the 20th century,” he also criticized Stümpke’s name creations as “criminal violations of the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature.” Simpson seized on Stümpke’s tone, lamenting the missing “rotated matrix” (a concept in mathematics that plays no part in zoology), along with the fact that Stümpke’s taxonomy was “painfully phylogenetic.” Simpson also notes that, “it is a custom, if not a duty, for a reviewer to hint that he knows more about the subject than the author and that the book would have been better if he, the reviewer, had taken time out from more important things to write the book himself.”
Other reviewers of Stümpke’s book oriented their analyses on the seeming seriousness of the book and wrote their own commentaries in the argot of scientific book reviews. To this day, Rhinogradentia comes up occasionally in publications that creatively and humorously expand on the snouter universe. For instance, the Max Planck Institute for Limnology in the northern German city of Plön announced a new species discovered in Lake Plön, while French scientists discovered a cache of amazingly wellpreserved snouter fossils. Alleged sightings are posted as photos or videos online every so often, and natural history museums curate whole shows on rhinogrades. In 1988, Gerolf Steiner dropped Stümpke for the new pseudonym Karl D. S. Geeste, but working with the same publishing house — the success of the first edition was such that the editor agreed to continue the joke — released a little hundred-page book cataloging the papers, reviews, and further studies that had taken place since the snouters’ discovery.
The central trait unique to all snouters is, “as the name indicates,” a snout known as the “nasarium,” which takes on a range of appearances across species and serves as the animals’ primary organ for locomotion and a wide range of other actions. As such, Steiner made an effort to indicate the specific nasal forms and functions in his names. He includes each species’ vernacular name in the description, allowing those readers less familiar with classical languages to understand each name’s derivation (perhaps this was also meant to redress Stümpke’s maladroitness in classical languages, criticized by Simpson as well as “Geeste” in the second book). For instance, Georrhinidia are Burrowing Snouters, the genus Holorrhinus represents the Wholesnouters, and Hopsorrhinus aureaus is known more commonly as the Golden Snout Leaper. Add to that a whole host of inspired name creations such as Archirrhinos haeckelii , Haeckel’s Primitive Snouter, in honor of our old friend Ernst Haeckel. Not a bad alternative to Bathybius haeckelii , that doomed primordial soup. Throughout, Steiner’s text is an absolute delight:
Tyrannonasus imperator is especially noteworthy for two reasons: like all polyrrhine species the animal is not particularly swift on nose, and yet it travels at a more rapid pace than the nasobemids. But now, since all polyrrhine species, because of their intranasal pneumatic apparatus, when walking give out a whistling hiss that can be heard from afar, Tyrannonasus is unable to creep silently upon his victims; but — since they flee while he is still at a distance — must first lie quietly in wait and then stride after.
And so on, for nearly eighty pages.
Excerpted from The Art of Naming by Michael Ohl, translated by Elisabeth Lauffer (The MIT Press, 2018).
The author relies on information from The Snouters: Form and Life of the Rhinogrades by Harald Stümpke translated by Leigh Chadwick (The Natural History Press, 1967)
