Interesting that this should have led you to Pallas. I've recently been led to him (and people like him, such as Blyth, Swinhoe, Temminck, etc.) through an article by a Chinese gentleman who is opposed to the idea that these people, often colonial administrators and explorers from the era of European empire-building, should be commemorated forever in the names of birds with which they only had a passing connection (often with dead specimens) at a particular stage of history. There seems to have been an ethos at the time that if you could get out there and discover lots of species for science, you could get to name them after yourself or some favoured beauty in a European court. I'm sure Pallas is entirely innocent, but the hangover of this particular era of empire building is really still quite apparent if you look at the Wikipedia article and see how many birds and animals have been graced with his name. (Even when these gentlemen had the decency to use local names they sometimes got it wrong. The scientific name of the komadori or Japanese Robin is Luscinia akahige, and that of the akahige or Ryuku Robin is Luscinia komadori because old Temminck got them mixed up. The official French names still have the two reversed.)

Thank you for mentioning the geode passage from the Pollak book, Languagehat. When I was in grad school Nancy Pollak taught a course that included Mandel'shtam, and I remember the geodes. She was tremendous fun to study with. I'll have to look for her book if I ever finish with the horseshoe poem!

Mongolian manūl, formerly ‘watchman’, now ‘bird-scarer’

I had never seen or heard "bird-scarer". Wouldn't "scarecrow" be the idiomatic word? or is this manūl such a specific type of object in Mongolian culture that "scarecrow" would be misleading?

It does sound odd, doesn't it? I looked it up in the OED and decided to make a new post of it.

To be exact, Bird scarer is manuukhai, manul is the guarding one, b/c it' very difficult to get closer to them, the guard is called manaa, manaach

Thanks for the clarification!

i meant a scarecrow - manuukhai, all the words have a common root mana, which means to guard, manai means ours (like the guarded thing perhaps, though maybe it's unrelated, about the pronoun i'm not sure
tanai means yours, tana, tanakh means to border something, mostly though clothes in sewing, tanadakh, tagnakh means to spy, could be all are related words, but i'm not a linguist)

Even when these gentlemen had the decency to use local names they sometimes got it wrong.

Yeah. Next time I have time and think of it, I'll look up the mess that are aguti, paca and pacarana. And I have no idea what the marvelous animal Captorhinus aguti is actually named after (...probably that's not even mentioned in the original description).

read: i meant a scarecrow - manuukhai, all the words have a common root mana, which means to guard, manai means ours (like the guarded thing perhaps, though maybe it's unrelated, about the pronoun i'm not sure
tanai means yours, tana, tanakh means to border something, mostly though clothes in sewing, tanadakh, tagnakh means to spy, could be all are related words, but i'm not a linguist)

Here is the point of view of a linguist:

manuukhal "scarecrow" and mana "to guard are probably related, as a scarecrow is "guarding" a field against birds.

tana, tanakh "to border" (= to sew a border) is most probably NOT related to tanadakh, tagnakh "to spy".

manai "ours" and tanai "yours" are probably related to each other, but in a different way: I would guess that words for I or my (or we and our) probably start with m and those for you or your probably start with t. This is very common in the languages of Eurasia, for instance in French moi "me" and toi "you" (in the singular). Typically, the first consonant is different (m or t) but the rest of the word is the same.

In Dutch "je" apparently means "you", probably like obsolete English "ye". There must be Franco-Dutch jokes about this, even though it's only evident in writing.

Don't you think the Captorhinus / Ectocynodon / Pariotichus aguti is just named after the agouti, which is presumably a Guarani name for the rodent? It was in de Léry and Cavia aguti Linn.