Re: Cladistic notation

["Colin McHenry" <cmchenry@westserv.net.au>]

-----Original Message-----
From: Charles Roustan <charlesroustan@softhome.net>
To: tholtz@geol.umd.edu <tholtz@geol.umd.edu>; mike@indexdata.com
<mike@indexdata.com>
Cc: dinosaur@usc.edu <dinosaur@usc.edu>
Date: Tuesday, 8 July 2003 10:16
Subject: Re: Cladistic notation


>This too, I can understand and if I was asked to turn this into a regular
>text-book-style cladogram I could do it, although I would ask myself the
>reason for all the asterisks but I've seen that some of you add ? and {}
and


Charles, the asterisks are to denote that the name is part of a bionem -
they are used to represent the italicisation of the name in ASCII text.
David Marjanovic and Jaime Headden use them, I think.  Others (including
myself) tend to use the underscore character instead of the asterisk,
because the asterisk is sometimes used as a mutiplication character, and the
underscore doesn't appear to be used for anything else.  Also, the
underscore is less visually intrusive upon the conained text.  Thus I would
right my favourite species of plesiosaur as _Kronosaurus queenslandicus_,
whilst David would right *Turdus merula* for one of his favourite backyard
birds.  Currently, each version is equally acceptable, at least on this
list.

As for the other stuff, you'll have to ask a cladist :-)

Cheers
Colin

Colin McHenry

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