Harrison Ford. Magnus Sundholm/Shutterstock
Harrison Ford is once again serving as the inspiration for a new species.
The animal — called Tachymenoides harrisonfordi — is a type of 16 inch, pale yellowish-brown snake that was found in the Andes Mountains in Peru.
Although he may be honored, Ford, 81, does wish he got named after some friendlier creatures.
“These scientists keep naming critters after me, but it’s always the ones that terrify children. I don’t understand. I spend my free time cross-stitching. I sing lullabies to my basil plants, so they won’t fear the night,” Ford said in a statement to Conservation International on Tuesday, August 15.
The actor also noted that the discovery is, in fact, “humbling,” adding that researchers discovering new species is important in learning more about our “wild world.”
“On this planet, all fates are intertwined, and right now, one million species are teetering on the edge of oblivion,” he continued. “We have an existential mandate to mend our broken relationship with nature and protect the places that sustain life.”
Ford — who has also been named after the Californian spider Calponia harrisonfordi and the ant species Pheidole harrisonfordi — shared that he does like snakes even if his character Indiana Jones famously hated them.
“The snake’s got eyes you can drown in, and he spends most of the day sunning himself by a pool of dirty water — we probably would’ve been friends in the early ‘60s,” he joked to the outlet.
Throughout his career, the Star Wars actor has been a strong environmental activist and is also the vice chair of the nonprofit group Conservation International.
“The climate crisis is real — the weight of scientific evidence is overwhelming, but evidence can be ignored,” Ford told TIME magazine in October 2020. “Leaders who choose to make climate change a divisive issue do it to protect the entrenched economic interests who profit from behavior that destroys our planet. It’s selfish. It’s short-sighted. It needs to stop. … This s—t is going to kill us.”
Scientists naming a snake after Ford is both ironic and timely considering his appearance in the June 2023 film Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny — his last time playing his titular role of Indiana Jones.
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“This is the final film in the series, and this is the last time I’ll play the character,” he told Total Film in April. “I anticipate that it will be the last time that he appears in a film … I have been ambitious to do this film for 10 years, and there finally came a time when we all committed to that. It was a joyous moment for me. I think it’s a rare situation that I find myself in.”
