Charles Darwin's Legless Crab and David Bowie's Spider: How Scientific Names Celebrate Heroes, Adventurers, and Villains / Stephen Heard; Translated from English — Moscow: Alpina Non-Fiction, 2021. — 290 pages. ISBN 978-5-91671-992-5 In his fascinating and engagingly written book, Stephen Heard presents amazing, highly instructive, and sometimes scandalous stories behind taxonomic nomenclature. Since the eighteenth century, when Carl Linnaeus’s binomial system of scientific names was adopted, scientists often gave animal and plant species names to honor or disgrace certain individuals. Some scientists settled ideological disputes by exchanging disparaging names, while others named flowers or beautiful jellyfish after their secret lovers. Thanks to these names, we preserve the memory of little-known dedicated scientists, travelers, and simply brave people, without whom many discoveries in biology would have been impossible. Scientific names tell us much about those to whom they are dedicated, as well as about their authors—their worldview, preferences, and weaknesses. UDC 001.4 BBK 11.1