Old NID
80262
If you have kids of a certain age, you know who Spongebob Squarepants is - if you watched the show with your kids, you probably wanted them to watch something else. Anything else.
But scientists occasionally like to try and shake their own square image by getting zany and naming a new species in some clever way - and so we get a new mushroom discovered in Borneo named Spongiforma squarepantsii.
Spongebob Squarepants is seemingly a sea sponge but the show did nothing for science awareness, since he looks like a kitchen sponge. S. squarepantsii is a mushroom yet they say its similarity to a sea sponge means the name makes sense.
Confusing? It doesn't matter, it got their names in the BBC.
