That's all fine, Scott, and I can understand where you are coming from, but there are very good reasons behind using scientific names rather than common names.

Australia was colonised by Brits a couple of hundred years ago. Many of them were clearly homesick and so decided to name all of the animals after familiar English animals. Consequently we have robins, bream, minnows, 'oaks', tortoises and magpies, yet don't really have any true robins, bream, minnows, oaks, tortoises or magpies. What we have are entirely different, unrelated animals that bear some vague resemblance to these other species.

Let's have a look at some examples using fish names between the US and Oz.

Take a deep breath... here we go...

Our bream is what you in the US would call a porgy. Another of our porgies is called a snapper but it bears no resemblance to what you would call a snapper, which is what we call red emperor, unless it is one of the smaller species of that group, which we might also call snapper. Our grey nurse shark looks nothing like your nurse shark, but is what you would call a sand tiger, your bluefish is our tailor, our gar are your half beaks but your gars aren't found here, our cod is your grouper, your cod is our beardie (or ling), our groper is your wrasse, unless it is a Queensland groper, in which case it really is a grouper -although some might call it a giant sea bass - but our small wrasses are still wrasses. We don't have your freshwater bass, you don't have our freshwater bass and the same goes for your/our minnows, but our minnows aren't really minnows and belong to a family that is only found here and in South America and are distantly, vaguely, related to your pike - which, of course, bear no relation to our pike.

Confused, yet? Let's look at monitors.

What you call a tree monitor is skinny and either green, black or black with yellow or blue spotting and comes from PNG or Indonesia. What locals here call a tree monitor is what you or I would call a lace monitor. What you would call a racehorse goanna is a small monitor sometimes known as a freckled monitor, but for many people in Australia it's another name for the sand goanna. what you call a sand goanna is what most Australians would call a sand goanna, except for those living up north which would be looking at what you would call an argus monitor but call it a sand goanna, anyway.

All of this can be rectified by using scientific name. Regardless of whether or not the subspecific names get changed periodically, for the most part the scientific name of a species is fairly stable and is consistent from one country to the next (we'll ignore the Varanus gouldii/panoptes fiasco of a few years ago for now )

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