The Scientific Names of North American Dragonflies

While we were preparing our book The Naming of Australia's Dragonflies, each of us consulted the etymologies given in A Checklist of North American Odonata: including English name, etymology, type locality, and distribution by Dennis R. Paulson & Sidney W. Dunkle (2012). When we met for the first time at the European Congress of Odonatology (2016) in Tyringe, Sweden, amongst our many conversations we agreed that we had found some entries which could warrant a review. Also recent work by Matti Hämäläinen had shed additional light on some people commemorated with an eponym. We contacted Dennis, the senior author of the checklist, and offered to provide amendments for some of the definitions, and he readily agreed. With this encouragement a number of amendments were suggested for inclusion in the next edition of the checklist. However, our research which included perusal of the original description for every taxon, revealed much information that could not be encapsulated in the phrase or sentence to match the checklist format. When assembled, it was fast approaching the size that warranted publication as a book. If a short biography of each author was included, a book it had to be.


We have many people to thank for help in finding copies of the more obscure references. Once the etymologies were essentially complete, and we had started on the biographies, Dennis recruited Harold "Hal" White to help with sourcing photographs of American practitioners and to give a point of contact for those entomologists still, or recently, active in this field.


Publication and Distribution presented another problem. This was not the sort of work that would be snapped up by a commercial publisher who would then market and distribute it worldwide, and it was not feasible to distribute from somewhere as remote from America as Australia (or Europe). Whilst many people now prefer publications as a pdf, neither of us would be happy if that were the only medium to be made available. Busybird Publishing, who prepared the volume on the Australian taxa, introduced us to the concept of Print On Demand, and that was the solution we had been seeking.


In November 2018 a new edition of the Checklist was published which required us to include an extra four species and another author's biography.


And here you have the result of that team's work over more than two years.