Ichthyornithidae and Marsh's nomenclature

[Stephan Pickering <stefanpickering2002@yahoo.com>]

The labyrinth of taxonomy of these taxa is worth
briefly elucidating.
In 1873, Marsh established his "sub-class"
Odontornithes for Ichythornis + Apatornis (although
the latter has no known skull material), and placed
both also in his "order" Ichthyornithes (used again in
1888 by Furbringer, who, contra Brodkorb 1967, did not
formulate the name, Brodkorb erecting
Ichthyornithiformes for Ichthyornis + Apatornis). 
Believing Ichthyornithes to be pre-occupied, Marsh in
1876 erected Odontotormae for Ichthyornis + Apatornis.
As Julia Clarke has discussed in her dissertation,
Marsh was premature, as Ichthyornithes has never been
found to be have been used by anyone other than Marsh
(as far as I know, the Marsh papers at Yale have never
produced any notes by him re: who may have used the
name). As has been repeatedly stressed by so many, all
of these names were not predicated on rigorous
phylogenetic systematics.
Clade names are, to be sure, codified in a preliminary
fashion in the PhyloCode, clade names for species, if
I am not mistaken, are covered, at the moment, in
Option M of Cantino et al. 1999: species are
uninomials. For example, "Tyrannosaurus rex" is not
the often contradictory, and obsolete Linnean
nomenclature, but is a combination of the least
inclusive clade "Tyrannosaurus" of which "rex", the
uninomial species name, is a part. Kevin de Querioz
(in 1998 and 1999)has explored species as lineage
conceptualizations, a species being a part of a
population-level lineage and species may/may not be
monophyletic although it is useful (and often correct)
to recognize a monophyletic operable species (a
species is not a clade) because, to be sure, we are
studying dinosaur biodiversity, and a species is a
useful unit of our organization of deductions. (I am,
here, paraphrasing Julia Clarke.)

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