The other day I stumbled upon this passage in the Wikipedia page of Piseinotecus, a genus of beautiful nudibranch sea slugs:
The name Piseinotecus comes from the Portuguese sentence “pisei no Teco” (I stepped onto Teco). Teco was the name of a dog of the zoologists Ernst Marcus and Eveline Du Bois-Reymond Marcus. While they were looking for a name for the genus, their friend, the zoologist Diva Diniz Corrêa, was visiting them and stated the sentence while coming down the stairs to announce that she had accidentally stepped onto their dog.
From the Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piseinotecus
What a delightful story! Ernst, Eveline, and Diva were brilliant zoologists and contributed immensely to our knowledge of marine invertebrates.
The source is a short paper of recollections written by Eveline:
Piseinotecus is an entire sentence in Portuguese. Our friend, Diva, stated it while coming down the stairs one day. She had stepped upon our dog, Teco, and while we were looking for a new generic name, had told us Pisei (in Portuguese) = I stepped; no = onto; Tecus = the dog’s name. In the meantime, this genus has turned out to be the type of a new family. Piseinotecidae appears in the literature today.
See it here: https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/45940346#page/459/mode/1up
Marcus, E. d. B.-R. (1987). Selected Recollections from My Life. American Malacological Bulletin, 5, 183–184. https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/part/143207
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