Named first, and still

Formal zoological naming begins in 1758, with the tenth edition of Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae. Nothing before it counts. The animals at the top of this list are among the first ever named — and the name they were given then is still the correct one now.

Surviving is the achievement. Thousands of names from the same decades did not: 4,488 older names in this work now lead somewhere else, because the animal was moved, merged or split. These were right the first time.

Ranked on the year science first described it, which 21,562 species carry. 10 have no figure recorded at all and cannot appear here. Ten species carry no year at all, and they are the only ones this page cannot place.