When the Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh painted "The Starry Night" in 1889, he did so while staring out a window from his mental asylum room in the French town of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. More than a century later, a team of scientists discovered a yellow-and-blue patterned lizard and were reminded of the same visual scene that once inspired one of history's most renowned painters.
Therefore, the team of Akshay Khandekar, Tejas Thackeray did Ishan Agarwal the only logical thing: They named the newly-discovered gecko after van Gogh, dubbing it with the scientific name Cnemaspis vangoghi. For people who prefer to use a common term, the authors suggest "Van Gogh’s starry dwarf gecko."
