Introducing a Hairy-Footed Shrimp Named After Bilbo Baggins

In 2009, scientists plucked a never-before-seen shrimp from the coastal reefs surrounding the Indonesian islands of Ternate and Tidore. The critter was tiny—it measured an eighth-inch long—and had hair covering its eight limbs. Researchers recently described this odd little shrimp for the first time in the journal ZooKeys, and as Jasmin Malik Chua reports for Live Science, they have given it the perfect name: Odontonia bagginsi, after Bilbo Baggins, the hairy-footed character in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

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(Charles Fransen)

Like its hobbit namesake, Odontonia bagginsi is also quite small.

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This hairy-limbed shrimp (Odontonia bagginsi) lives inside a sea squirt.

A hairy shrimp wandering around on the Atmosphere Resorts house reef.