A ledger of the names of life: how many names stand, how many have fallen, and who we chose to put into a binomial.
2,614,593 species-rank names stand.
2,379,729 have fallen — 47.6% of everything ever published.
4,994,322 species-rank names are in the GBIF Backbone in total.
Sister project: Damnatio — the fallen names themselves, each with the name that absorbed it.
Species-rank names in the GBIF Backbone, by nomenclatural status. “Fallen” is every status that is not ACCEPTED.
| Status | Names | Share |
|---|---|---|
| ACCEPTED | 2,614,593 | 52.4% |
| SYNONYM | 1,952,350 | 39.1% |
| HOMOTYPIC_SYNONYM | 166,396 | 3.3% |
| HETEROTYPIC_SYNONYM | 141,639 | 2.8% |
| DOUBTFUL | 105,132 | 2.1% |
| PROPARTE_SYNONYM | 14,212 | 0.3% |
Per kingdom. A row counts everything below that node, not the node alone.
| Kingdom | Standing | Fallen | % fallen |
|---|---|---|---|
| Animalia | 1,822,234 | 1,231,545 | 40.3% |
| Plantae | 446,842 | 949,020 | 68.0% |
| Fungi | 172,327 | 151,941 | 46.9% |
| Chromista | 101,151 | 38,905 | 27.8% |
| Bacteria | 47,550 | 5,307 | 10.0% |
| Viruses | 16,057 | 20 | 0.1% |
| Protozoa | 4,626 | 2,799 | 37.7% |
| Clade | Standing | Fallen | % fallen |
|---|---|---|---|
| Insecta | 1,105,104 | 715,509 | 39.3% |
| Magnoliopsida | 298,898 | 638,560 | 68.1% |
| Reptilia | 120,268 | 124,822 | 50.9% |
| Arachnida | 112,575 | 37,457 | 25.0% |
| Liliopsida | 92,798 | 180,721 | 66.1% |
| Agaricomycetes | 42,982 | 47,507 | 52.5% |
| Mammalia | 21,100 | 19,140 | 47.6% |
| Aves | 14,641 | 10,895 | 42.7% |
Plants are the surprise: in Plantae more than two thirds of all species-rank names ever published have been reduced to synonyms, and in Magnoliopsida alone 638,560 names fell against 298,898 that stand, while animals keep a clear majority standing. A plant name is far more likely to have been a hypothesis than a verdict.
When a name is not a description, it is a dedication. Read from Wikidata's
named after property, which is populated by hand and therefore incomplete: it records
16,404 taxa, not every eponym ever published. Treat the shape of the answer as the
finding and the absolute number as a lower bound.
16,404 taxa record a dedication.
10,963 are named after a person (66.8%).
9,796 distinct honorees.
2,195 women to 8,653 men among those people.
0 records name no honoree at all.
What Wikidata does not say, for the 10,963 records dedicated to a person: 111 carry no gender, 1,241 no citizenship and 1,047 no birth year. A further 12 records point at an anonymous Wikidata node — a dedication whose subject the source never resolves to an entity. Those gaps are the source's, not the crawl's: the counts below are over what exists.
People whose names appear in the most taxon names.
| Honoree | Taxa |
|---|---|
| Claude Besuchet | 122 |
| Ivan Löbl | 71 |
| Petar Beron | 65 |
| John Sibthorp | 55 |
| Ernst Hartert | 51 |
| David Attenborough | 50 |
| Volker Mahnert | 48 |
| Roger de Lessert | 45 |
| Peter J. Schwendinger | 36 |
| William John Ansorge | 35 |
| Philibert Commerson | 30 |
| Mary J. Rathbun | 30 |
| Alfred Hart Everett | 30 |
| Edward O. Wilson | 29 |
| Sirindhorn, Princess Royal | 28 |
| Eduard Fischer | 27 |
| Allan Hume | 26 |
| Michael R. Gray | 26 |
| William Ruxton Davison | 26 |
| Wilmatte Porter Cockerell | 26 |
| Nicolas Bové | 23 |
| Nelson Mandela | 22 |
| Teuvo Tapio Ahti | 22 |
| Victor Jacquemont | 21 |
| Peter H. Raven | 21 |
| Charles Darwin | 21 |
| Edgar Leopold Layard | 20 |
| Barbara York Main | 20 |
| Charles Lienhard | 19 |
| Jean Péricart | 19 |
The same property also carries places, ships and institutions. A prefecture can carry more names than any naturalist.
| Honoree | Taxa |
|---|---|
| Lijiang | 104 |
| Hainan Island | 66 |
| Zhejiang | 52 |
| Yadong County | 48 |
| Jingdong Yi Autonomous County | 40 |
| Malta | 38 |
| Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture | 38 |
| Yunnan | 37 |
| Yingjiang County | 32 |
| Dali | 25 |
| Siberia | 21 |
| Rhodope Mountains | 20 |
| Wuliang Shan | 19 |
| Jeju Island | 19 |
| Hallasan | 18 |
| Taiwan Island | 18 |
| Mêdog County | 17 |
| Namibia | 17 |
| FRV Kapala | 17 |
| Sichuan | 16 |
| Nepal | 16 |
| Maguan County | 15 |
| Manchuria | 15 |
| Bulgaria | 15 |
| Gollum | 14 |
| Quasimodo | 14 |
| Japan | 14 |
| Himalayas | 12 |
| Guangxi | 12 |
| Darth Vader | 11 |
| Gender | Taxa |
|---|---|
| male | 8,653 |
| female | 2,195 |
| unknown | 112 |
| trans woman | 3 |
| Country | Taxa |
|---|---|
| United States | 1,540 |
| France | 956 |
| United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland | 636 |
| United Kingdom | 614 |
| Switzerland | 555 |
| Germany | 456 |
| New Zealand | 380 |
| Australia | 346 |
| Russian Empire | 240 |
| Kingdom of Great Britain | 191 |
| Austria | 153 |
| Brazil | 149 |
| Kingdom of Prussia | 147 |
| Russia | 144 |
| Bulgaria | 140 |
| Century | Taxa |
|---|---|
| 1400s | 92 |
| 1500s | 96 |
| 1600s | 122 |
| 1700s | 1,044 |
| 1800s | 3,960 |
| 1900s | 4,446 |
| 2000s | 32 |
Taxonomy: GBIF Backbone Taxonomy — dataset key d7dddbf4-2cf0-4f39-9b2a-bb099caae36c,
licence CC BY 4.0.
Citation: GBIF Secretariat (2026). GBIF Backbone Taxonomy. Checklist dataset. https://doi.org/10.15468/39omei accessed via GBIF.org
Dedications: Wikidata, queried by src/eponyms.py, licence CC0 1.0.
Computed by src/ledger.py, src/eponyms.py and src/site.py
in this repository. Generated 2026-10-03 11:35 UTC.
A status is one checklist's assertion, not a fact about the world. The seven kingdom rows sum to 4,990,324 against a total of 4,994,322: 3,998 names sit outside all seven branches.
Code MIT. Data as licensed by its sources. See ATTRIBUTION.md.