Lately, we’ve seen interesting things being named after celebrities like a treadmill on the International Space Station named after Stephen Colbert, but this honor for director Tim Burton is unique. Bridgette Clarkston, a doctoral student at the University of New Brunswick’s Fredericton campus has named a brand new species of seaweed after the director.
Clarkson works for one of the world’s leading seaweed science laboratories and travels to collect and catalogue species of seaweed across North America.
The official name of this seaweed is Euthora timbutonii and Clarkson says that she named the seaweed after Burton because of what it looks like:
“I decided to name this new species in honour of film director Tim Burton because I grew up watching and loving his films, and I think they had an influence on my imagination. And so when I’m scuba diving in British Columbia and I see this new species and I was collecting it, to me it looked like some kind of strange underwater flower and it always makes me think of Nightmare Before Christmas when I see it, so I thought, why not? The seaweeds themselves kind of look like petals from a flower, so it’s kind of a twisted vision. But to me, underwater it looks like a bunch of undersea flowers that we go along and pick.”
This species of seaweed was discovered in 2007 in British Columbia, but not “formally described in a scientific publication” until February in the Canwest News Service. Clarkson explains:
“We were collecting it for years and didn’t really realize it was a new species until we sequenced it genetically.”
Gary Saunders who operates the lab at the University of New Brunswick adds that the discovery of new species of seaweed is more common than you might think:
“Since our lab began using the DNA barcode for species identification, we have uncovered dozens of new species and new records of species for the Canadian marine flora and many are from Atlantic Canada. These discoveries are even more incredible because the diversity of the marine flora in Canadian waters was considered to be very well known prior to our survey.”
Clarkson has notified Burton’s people, but no word of the director’s reaction to this honor yet.
[Source] NationalPost, CBC
