 The earliest known mention of a slow loris in scientific literature is from 1770, when Dutchman Arnout Vosmaer (1720 – 1799) described a specimen of what we know today as N. bengalensis that he had received two years earlier. The French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, later questioned Vosmaer's decision to affiliate the animal with sloths, arguing that it was more closely aligned with the lorises of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and Bengal. The word "loris" was first used in 1765 by Buffon as a close equivalent to a Dutch name, loeris. This etymology was later supported by the physician William Baird in the 1820s, who noted that the Dutch word loeris signified "a clown".
