10 Cool Animals Named After Lord of the Rings Characters

J.R.R. Tolkien has no shortage of fans in the science world. Dozens (at least) of organisms have been named after Lord of the Rings lore: creatures, locations, Elvish words, and more. Here are 10 extant species whose taxonomies pay tribute to Middle-earth’s most famous characters.

Psyllids , a.k.a. jumping plant lice, are a family of true bugs (Hemiptera) that feed off plant juice; each kind of psyllid typically lives off a particular kind of plant. In 2019, researchers published a paper supporting the theory that the psyllids endemic to New Zealand’s kōwhai trees aren’t all Psylla apicalis . They named the newly identified species Psylla frodobagginsi after Frodo Baggins for two reasons: one, because these bugs are smaller than apicalis , like Hobbits are smaller than humans; and two, because Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies were filmed in New Zealand. Psylla frodobagginsi is casually known as the Hobbit psyllid .

New Zealand as the Lord of the Rings filming location also inspired the name Gandalfus for a genus of blind crabs first found in the underwater volcanoes around New Zealand’s Kermadec Islands [ PDF ]. That inaugural species was christened Gandalfus puia in 2007; puia is Māori for “volcano” or “geothermal spring.” Gandalfus puia has little in common with its eponymous wizard, though Redditors have pointed out that it lives near hot deep-sea vents—and Gandalf is no stranger to a deep, fiery crevasse.

Myloplus sauron , on the other hand, does bear some resemblance to its namesake, Sauron, the evil maker of the One Ring. It’s a species of pacu—a relative of piranhas—that lives in Brazil’s Xingu River basin and flaunts one vertical black stripe along its flank. The stripe’s similarity to the Eye of Sauron is pretty uncanny, but it’s not the most off-putting thing about this fish: It has blunt, eerily human-looking teeth .

Spaeleoleptes gimli is another native Brazilian: It’s a species of daddy longlegs, a.k.a. harvestmen, discovered in a subterranean cave in the state of Bahia. Researchers named it after the dwarf Gimli due to dwarves’ affinity for mining and caves. “Particularly,” researchers wrote in a 2024 paper , “Gimli explicitly expresses his fascination for the Glittering Caves of Aglarond with their extensive series of spectacular speleothems, and after the defeat of Sauron, he was given the lordship over this marvelous cave.”

Bahia is also home to freshwater snails named for two of Tolkien’s bravest and most beloved secondary heroes. There’s Idiopyrgus eowynae in honor of Éowyn, a woman warrior who “exemplifies courage, resilience, and resistance against darkness, both internal and external, standing against Gríma Wormtongue and the Witch-king of Angmar,” researchers explained in a 2024 paper . And then there are Idiopyrgus meriadoci after Meriadoc “Merry” Brandybuck, a Hobbit who, in addition to “standing with Éowyn against the Witch-king in the Battle of the Pelennor Fields,” serves as “an example of the fight for nature conservation in Middle-earth, pushing the Ents into action and ultimately ending Saruman’s threat to Fangorn Forest.”

The Ents—tree-like humanoids that protect regular trees—of Fangorn Forest have earned their own taxonomical shout-out in the form of Uroplatus fangorn , a species of gecko found in the forests of Madagascar. It’s a special tribute to the oldest Ent, Treebeard, also known as Fangorn ( Fangorn means “Treebeard” in the Elvish language Sindarin). Researchers chose the epithet in part because the geckos hail from “a deep, dark woodland” not unlike Fangorn Forest and because they, too, look like a kind of living tree.

Real Tolkien fans know that Galadriel, the Elf queen of Lothlórien, wields one of the Elves’ three Rings of Power; hers is Nenya, the Water Ring. The researchers who discovered Pseudophallus galadrielae in and around Guatemala’s Lago Izabal knew that, too—because it’s why they chose to name their newfound freshwater pipefish species after her. They explained in a 2020 paper that the moniker is a nod to “the additional bony rings diagnostic of the new species and its association with freshwater habitats.”

In 1953, an unknown species of shark was found in New Zealand waters and named Triakis attenuata : Triakis is a genus of houndsharks, and attenuata refers to this one’s attenuated (i.e., long and slender) body. Twenty years later, shark expert Leonard Compagno reclassified them into a new genus, Gollum , because “this shark bears some resemblance in form and habits” to the mutant Hobbit of the same name. Gollum attenuatus —a.k.a. the slender smooth-hound or gollumshark —and Tolkien’s Gollum are both extremely thin, brownish-gray, skulking bottom-feeders.

Smaug giganteus —a.k.a. the giant girdled lizard or the sungazer—was also reclassified from a different genus ( Cordylus ) into its own. Researchers chose Smaug as the genus name because The Hobbit ’s antagonistic dragon “lived underground and was heavily armored,” much like Smaug giganteus . They also mentioned that Tolkien was born in South Africa’s Free State province, which is the sungazer’s “core area of distribution.”

All the main Hobbits and Tolkien himself have wasp alter egos. Shireplitis (after the Shire) is a wasp genus native to New Zealand whose species include Shireplitis bilboi (Bilbo Baggins), Shireplitis frodoi (Frodo), Shireplitis meriadoci (Meriadoc), Shireplitis peregrini (Peregrin “Pippin” Took), Shireplitis samwisei (Samwise “Sam” Gamgee), and Shireplitis tolkieni (Tolkien). It’s unclear whether the scientists tried to match the wasps to each character by appearance or just assigned names at random—but it’s worth pointing out that Shireplitis meriadoci is lighter-colored and slightly longer than S. peregrini (just as Merry is blonder and slightly taller than Pippin).

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