You wrote:
<And how about Cypraea camelopardalis?>
 
The name of this species is a good example of the way scientific
names evolve.  Linnaeus, in naming the various animals he was
familiar with, often used the common Latin noun, when there was one,
as the genus name for the animal he was naming.  For example, the
camel was an animal widely known long before Linnaeus' time, and
therefore, as you might expect, it had common names in several
languages.  The common name for this animal in Latin was camelus.
Therefore, Linnaeus used Camelus as the genus for the camel.  The
common Latin word for leopard, also a well-known animal, was pardus.
However, Linnaeus couldn't use pardus as the genus of the leopard
because the tiger had already been named Panthera tigris, and
Linnaeus felt that the leopard was closely enough related to the
tiger to be placed in the same genus - Panthera.  So instead, he used
the Latin word for leopard as the species name, rather than the genus
name, and called the leopard Panthera pardus.  In naming the giraffe,
again there was a common Latin noun available - giraffa - so that
became the genus name of the giraffe.  In choosing the species name,
Linnaeus observed that this strange beast had the head of a camel and
the markings of a leopard; therefore he took the genus name of the
camel (Camelus) and the species name of the leopard (pardus), and
combined them to form the name camelopardalis.  The giraffe became
known to the scientific world as Giraffa camelopardalis.  Many years
later, Perry was presented with specimens of a new cowrie from the
Red Sea area.  Its tauny color and spotted pattern reminded him of
the markings of a giraffe (you have to give these guys credit for
imagination if nothing else!).  He might have named this new species
Cypraea giraffa (which I have always thought would have been the
preferred choice), but instead he went to the species name of the
giraffe, and used it for the cowrie, so we ended up with the tongue
twister Cypraea camelopardalis (common name, as you might guess -
giraffe cowrie).
 
Paul M.