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Thanks djawhufc (that must be playfair encoded!). Cracked the names now. Only the coding to do.

I am at the very end of the puzzle and don’t know where I have gone wrong. I have the name at 1, spelt with oe as the fifth and sixth letters, and a nine-letter codeword which works for all the pairs except the third and fifth. I am pretty certain 5d begins with w and 8d with m. Please could someone help me? Thanks!

The code word is 4 letters

Your letters are correct

Orientfan, I'm pretty sure that oe is an acceptable spelling abroad, unless in a scientific or biographical context, or if you were writing to one of the family...

One codeword is of 8 letters, relating to the work by WH, this one uses the * answers; for 5 & 8 the letters are L & O respectively. The other codeword is of 4 letters, relating to the work by ES; for 5 & 8 the letters are W & M respectively.

Huge thanks DJA and Meursault. Got it now. Amazing how you can fixate on a solution that is three-fifths provable and struggle to consider alternatives. In my view, a four-letter codeword in a Playfair with so few pairs would be almost impossible without online aid. And I write that as someone who has always enjoyed nutting them out with pen, paper and occasionally Scrabble tiles.

Orientfan, I also wondered how anyone could solve both codewords without online help. It was my intention to solve the Playfairs unaided, which I have done before, but this time I was forced to abandon that idea and resort to aids. As you say, there are too few letter pairs.

I was actually struggling to solve the two key clues, the first one because of the obscure indication of CH, the second because I took the last two words of the clue to denote a particular example, of which I found five famous ones. I therefore used the Quinapalus site to generate all possible letter strings for DBAH and WYBM. I then copied and pasted them into Word and searched for a common string. I found two - EATO and EARD. Only one of the lists contained the last four letters of one of the names. Odd that, because they make a word in
its own right.

Contradicting my previous comment, I now think that both Playfair codewords are solvable without a Playfair cracker, though the longer one may be easier. In the case of the latter it can be established from three of the letter pairs that EBD must appear in a line or a column, as must IDM. QE in row 1 is also helpful. After some experimenting I had the skeleton of a grid with four letters of the codeword in place. I then entered the pattern into Chambers. Ignoring words with repeated letters there were only two options, differing by one letter.
The shorter codeword is harder because the encoding of DI doesn't result in either of those letters so they are clearly not in the same row or column. It's still doable.

Admittedly I already knew the codewords, but I set that aside and simply experimented with moving known letter arrangements around.

I rather regret running out of patience and resorting to the online aid. I'm pretty certain that the editors would not have allowed the puzzle had an online code cracker been essential.

I assume that the setter had to add the extra E in one of the names because Playfair won't work with an odd number of letters.

It is not really an extra letter. It is a recognised alternative spelling acording to Wikipedia.
I am puzzled how identifying the cryptoanabiotic animal resolves uncertainty. I can only see one correct solution.
I too tried and failed to solve the cypher. This is the first Playfair I have come across. It was only after giving up and looking at the forum that I realised that on line tools are available.
I am still counting this as a success though as I did all the rest unaided and the solution was easy with the right tool.

Smithsax, there are two grid solutions that observe the requirement to use different codewords for 1 and 10. One of them does not have the thematic animal.