Name A Bat After Someone You Love

Or a turtle.

Starting Monday, Purdue University researchers will be auctioning off the naming rights to seven recently discovered types of bats hailing from Mexico, South America, Central America and Africa. And if the bats seem too "last Christmas," there's also a pair of yet-to-be-named Amazonian turtles up for grabs.

Universities and ecological organizations across the country have begun to view the naming rights to new species of birds, bugs and mammals as a way to draw big bucks to fund their research.

"There's not very much money to support the kind of work it takes to discover these new species," said John Bickham, a Purdue professor of forestry and natural resources and discoverer of several of the new bats. "Money generated by someone who says, 'I'm passionate about the environment, and I'd love to go down in history by having a species of organism named after me,'— that's very important to our continued work."

Ain't capitalism great? It'll even underwrite its enemies.