Melbourne taxi owner legends, and general all-round nice-guys, Danny, Moses and Ace Elfakhari and their families just got the big honour in having a newly discovered species of turtle named in their honour.
The species Cuora elfakhariorum Hoser, 2021 was formally named on 16 August 2021 in a two volume monograph on the world's turtles.
Published by Raymond Hoser, the massive scientific work, named 35 new species of turtles from all over the world, including the African soft-shelled species Cycloderma tismorum Hoser, 2021 from Tanzania, named in honour of Melbourne rock band TISM.
In the etymology for Cuora elfakhariorum Hoser, 2021, Hoser wrote:
C. elfakhariorum sp. nov. is named in honour of three brothers Daniel, Akram and Moses Elfakhari in recognition of their services to the taxi industry in Australia over many decades and critically important (and largely unrecognized) assistances to wildlife conservation in Australia over the same period.
The naming of the African Turtle after the Melbourne band TISM has followed on from an earlier discovery in which TISM guitarist Jock Paull was also honoured with a genus of North American Snake named in his honour.
Paull, was one of the famous masked singers in the 1990’s Melbourne band TISM.
He also performed numerous services to wildlife conservation in Australia, for which he is not as well known.
Paull has sadly since died of a painful lung cancer (9 April 2008) and is now survived by his long-time girlfriend and now (2021) adult child who can still be seen at cafes and rock venues across Melbourne when not doing her tertiary studies.
Both also live in Melbourne’s outer south-east, where they are revered by the locals as living treasures.
As already metnioned above, TISM (an acronym of the phrase This Is Serious Mum) were a seven-piece anonymous alternative rock band from Melbourne, Australia. They grew a huge cult following which persists to this day (2021), with a revival of interest in the band coinciding with the Covid-19 lockdowns in Melbourne.
They always appeared with heads covered or wearing masks, so that their true identity would not be revealed to the public at large.
The group was formed on 30 December 1982 by vocalist/drummer Humphrey B. Flaubert, bassist/vocalist Jock Cheese and keyboardist/vocalist Eugene de la Hot Croix Bun.
Their third album, Machiavelli and the Four Seasons, reached the Australian national top 10 in 1995 and still generates a huge playlist audience via online platforms.
The genus of snake named in honour of Paull, Jockpaullus Hoser, 2012, is a divergent genus, associated with Rhadinaea Cope, 1863.
As part of a global audit of the world’s snakes at the genus level, leading reptile expert, taxonomist and scientist Raymond Hoser identified this previously unnamed genus of snakes for the first time in the early 2000’s.
However, Hoser, better known as the Snakeman, who also runs the Reptile Party business in Melbourne was so busy it took him nearly a decade to publish his big paper that named the genus in honour of Paull.
Raymond Hoser, has discovered and named more species and genera of snake than anyone else alive.
He also named the genus Brucerogersus Hoser, 2012 in honour of Bruce Rogers, one of Australia’s leading Didgeridoo makers and players in another major scientific paper published in 2012. Rogers of Kangaroo Ground on the northern edge of Melbourne also died of cancer in 2016. That genus of snakes is a divergent group of North American Garter Snakes.
Raymond Hoser’s live reptiles have featured in a number of well-known music videos of Australian artists. He supplied the large Goanna Lizards used the clip for Great Southern Land, by Icehouse, featuring Iva Davies.
The clip was filmed in a disused quarry at Terrey Hills on the northern edge of Sydney, Australia.
Snakeman's crocodiles regularly appear on TV and music videos, adverts, etc, as does his venomous and non venomous snakes.
BOXBOY (real name, Harrison Richard Wain) a music icon of recent years, has used Snakeman Raymond Hoser's snakes a number of times when making his video clips in Melbourne, Victoria and some of this material can be found on Instagram. Another species of turtle Cuora boxboyi Hoser, 2021 was also discovered and named by Hoser in his big 2 volume monograph at the same time the TISM species was named.
That animal, appropriately known to locals as "the box turtle", occurs in Indonesia.
Raymond Hoser's famous reptile parties have been less frequently seen in 2021 as a result of Covid-19 lockdowns.
The banning of public gatherings has meant that outdoor events with reptile shows, school incursions and even private reptile parties have been outlawed for much of the year in a bid to control covid-19.
While Snakeman Raymond Hoser and his reptile parties are still regularly booked by Hoser and his dedicated team of conservationists, most have had to be cancelled in days prior to planned events due to ongoing government demands and restrictions tied in with the Coronavuirus pandemic. Hoser's Melbourne reptile shows remain the gold standard for school incursions, wildlife displays and other forms of event education about animals. His reptile party business model has been copied across Australia and also in foreign countries.
Reptile parties and similar are now one of the most popular forms of entertainment for kids bird
thday parties, school holiday programs and the like. Like musicians, there are less of these about at the moment due to the Covid-19 restrictions.
