I thought that was strange as well. ÂIn a similar vein, we have
_Confuciusornis_ rather than _Confuciornis_. ÂI've wondered if when
genera or species are erected that incorporate the names of revered
historical or religious figures, then a conscious decision is made
to keep the entire name intact, as a mark of respect. ÂAfter all,
we also have _Lazarussuchus_, which was named after Lazarus, a
biblical (New Testament) character.
I suspect that it has more to do with people seeing the whole name as
a morpheme (i.e., discrete unit of language), since names generally
are morphemes in isolating languages like English and (especially)
Mandarin. Thus they fail to recognize the grammatical parts of the
name, and assume they can just tack something on to the end. (A good
test would be to see if people who speak fusional languages like
German or Russian make this mistake less often.)