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Human Origins Program at the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History.
What's in a Name?
Lemur
How did a boy raised by wolves lend his name to a primate from Madagascar? The word “lemur” derives from the Latin word, lemures—meaning specters or spirits of the dead—and was given to these prosimians on account of the animals’ ghostly faces and nocturnal habits. The evolution of this Latin word has its own haunted history. According to ancient mythology, the city of Rome was founded by twin brothers Romulus and Remus, who had been suckled by a she-wolf as babies.
Arguing over who should rule the new city, Romulus murdered Remus and named the city after himself. But the ghost of the fallen brother haunted Rome from then on. Every May, citizens of Rome would hold a festival—first called Remuria, but later corrupted to Lemuria—to expiate the ghost of Remus and other ancestral spirits. From this tradition grew the word lemures, one of several Latin words—including larva, the shell of a ghost—used to refer to various forms of phantom.
“Lemuria” also is the name of a mythological sunken super-continent, akin to Atlantis, once believed to lie in the Indian Ocean—coincidentally near the real lemur’s native home.
—Alex Hawes and Sue Zwicker
ZooGoer 30(4) 2001. Copyright 2001. Friends of the National Zoo. All rights reserved.
