Re: Cladistic notation

["Tim Williams" <twilliams_alpha@hotmail.com>]

> 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.

Like Colin, I use underscore characters to indicate a genus and/or species 
name.  The underscore has the additional advantage in that underscored words 
are converted into italics by many wordprocessing programs.



Tim

_________________________________________________________________
MSN 8 with e-mail virus protection service: 2 months FREE*  
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/virus