The genus
Apus was erected by the Italian naturalist
Giovanni Antonio Scopoli in 1777 based on
tautonymy and the
common swift which had been given the
binomial name Hirundo apus by the Swedish naturalist
Carl Linnaeus in 1758. The name
Apus is
Latin for a swift, thought by the ancients to be a type of
swallow with no feet (from
Ancient Greek α,
a, "without", and πούς,
pous, "foot"). Before the 1950s, there was some controversy over which group of organism should have the
genus name
Apus. In 1801,
Bosc gave the genus name
Apus to the small
crustacean organisms known today as
Triops, and later authors continued to use this term.
Ludwig Keilhack suggested (in 1909) that this was incorrect since there was already an avian genus named
Apus by
Scopoli in 1777. The controversy was ended in 1958 when the
International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN) ruled against the use of the genus name
Apus for the crustaceans and recognized the name
Triops. ==Species==