Pantone-deaf, Naked Mole Rat Perfume, a Berry of Many Names
August 26, 2026
AI Summary
5 min readA 1912 book called Color Standards and Color Nomenclature contains 1,115 hand-painted color swatches, each one mixed and applied by the ornithologist Robert Ridgway and his wife Julia. The book was the direct ancestor of the Pantone color system. Fifty years later, when Lawrence Herbert bought a printing company and created Pantone, he referenced older color guides — including Ridgway's — to build his standardized system. Ridgway had started the project decades earlier because he was frustrated that fellow bird scientists could not agree on what "brownish-blue" meant. That is the throughline of one of the three main stories in this episode: the hidden natural history of something we treat as a commercial abstraction.
How a 19th-century bird artist invented the color wheel for ornithologists
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:00) **Introduction & Guest Intro** - Hosts Rachel Feltman and Liz Clayton Fuller welcome guest Alexis Nicole Nelson, an outdoor educator and foraging expert, to the show.
- 2 (05:10) **Teasers** - Each host offers a one-line preview of their weird fact for the episode.
- 3 (07:03) **Liz's Fact: Birds, Color, and the Origin of Pantone** - Liz explains how the need to describe bird colors led to the creation of modern color systems.
- 4 (17:23) **Bird Color Science Sidebar** - Liz explains the structural trick behind blue jay feathers.
- 5 (29:00) **Rachel's Fact: The Stinky Social Structure of Naked Mole Rats** - Rachel details how a chemical scent from the queen maintains social order and suppresses reproduction.
- 6 (33:16) **Naked Mole Rat Biology Background** - Rachel provides context on the bizarre biology of naked mole rats.
- 7 (53:02) **Alexis's Fact: The Berry of Many Names (Amelanchier)** - Alexis explores the myriad common names for the Amelanchier genus, revealing its cultural and linguistic history.
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Show Notes
Alexis Nikole joins the show to talk about the heinous etymology of the juneberry (if that's even it's real name...). Plus, Liz Clayton Fuller returns to explain how birds are behind Pantone, and Rachel details the ins and outs of Naked Mole Rat society -- and what it has to do with their STINK.
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