Re: New PaleoBios paper - diplodocoid phylogenetic taxonomy

["Jaime A. Headden" <qilongia@yahoo.com>]

Mike Keesey (keesey@gmail.com) wrote:

<Wait--is that enough to make the name available? What does the ICZN say?>

Captions to figures are available, as text that can be used to describe
statements not explicated in the text. They are essentially text, and can be
descriptive. The statement indicates a name, a type specimen, and is applied to
a figure of the specimen in question, and thus conforms to ICZN directives; it
was further diagnosed with other fossils in the main body of the paper, though
an explicit differential diagnosis was not given (the last is actually not done
for a host of new taxa and in practice goes back a hundred years; if editors
were to strictly apply to a full differential diagnosis, they must also allow
papers naming taxa to be formatted to include such and authors need to be more
careful in describing such if they want people to use the names explicitly
instead of having to invent a diagnosis themselves, otherwise it's either lazy
or their observation is not based on a differentiation in which case their
taxon doesn't appear to be explicitly unique, and they don't want you to think
about that). If this had been done as part of the graphic itself, it would be
questionable, to say the least. The name has also long been upheld by history
and it seems unlikely it will ever lead, but I do not see anything about the
process of it's naming to refute using it.

  Cheers,

Jaime A. Headden

"Innocent, unbiased observation is a myth." --- P.B. Medawar (1969)


                
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