Re: Personal Perspectives [was crocodylians, amphibians ... (was Sarcosuchus)]

["Robert G. Tuck Jr." <tuckr@digital.net>]

Esteemed Honored Persons, All,

Somehow, I've managed to keep lighting candles in *both* my personal shrines
to Linneaeus and Darwin, despite the fact that their underlying, guiding
philosophies are diametrically opposed. I have no shrine to Hennig. It's not
a matter of taste or distaste; it's simple expediency.

Crudely put, Linneaeus looked to Aristotle and archetypes and stability and
divine creations; Darwin hearkened to Thales and subtle mutabilities and
instabilities and dynamic changes. Both gave us universal tools for
descriptions of natural processes and products. It is up to us to determine
and agree upon (or not) how to use these various approaches in describing
the universe we perceive around us and within which we exist.

Without Linneaeus, I would be tongue-tied when trying to express biological
relationships. Without Darwin, I would be clueless in trying to understand,
or at least  to make sense of, the living world.

When I was collecting small mammals in Iran and Pakistan for the Smithsonian
Institution, for example, I applied Linneaean names to the critters (jirds,
jerboas, girbils, dormice, rats, mice, etc.) I caught in the field. Several
turned out to be new species (_Myomimus setzeri_ comes to mind, named for my
late boss [Dr. Henry Setzer] at the USNM Division of Mammals, by a Soviet
researcher, despite the fact that *I* was the one actually under the
Soviets' watchtower guns and searchlights on the Iran/USSR border when I
snagged the holotype.)  It was a tense time during the "Cold War." Years
later, but still before the collapse of the Soviet Union, I enjoyed many
laughs at my expense at the then Soviet Academy of Sciences in Leningrad. I
suggest that I am the only active member on this List who has personally
examined Triassic dinosaur footprints in Kerman Province, Iran, and has
personally confirmed (but did *not* discover) the existence of Indian Mugger
crocodiles and studied their population dynamics in Iranian Baluchistan (my
field notes and manuscript were seized by the minions of the 'Ayatollah
Khomeini, hence no formal publication)..

The upshot is, according to my field notes at the time, that I recognized
the several specimens I caught as being dormice (genus _Myomimus_ ) and I
characterized them accordingly within the rodents, and, by extension, within
the Mammalia. Although I had owned, read, and reread, an English version of
Hennig's work (excruciatingly painful style, dwelling altogether too much on
insects) during my undergraduate years, I felt no compunction to delve into
the finer details of rodent phylogeny. My subsequent publications dealing
with Iranian and Pakistani amphibians and reptiles (_sensu_ Linneaeus)
maintained my conservative approach to taxonomy, and you will even find
examples of my work in the recently published second edition of
_Introduction to Herpetology_ (Academic Press, 2001),  which, overall,
employs cladistics.

Familiarity with cladistics may not help a starving child, but it may lead
to the discovery and elucidation of medications and procedures and food
crops that give children everywhere new hope for life. That, I assert,
transcends quibbles regarding formal or informal characterizations of
crocodiles and their real or putative relatives.

May I please submit that, whatever our individual views, philosophies, or
interpretations might be, our ultimate obligations must rest with the health
and well-being and quality of life of our fellow _Homo sapiens_ throughout
this small planet. It's good to seek the truth regarding, say, archosaur
relationships. It's even better to feed and comfort a child.

-= Tuck =-