Re: Ichthyornithidae and Marsh's nomenclature

["David Marjanovic" <david.marjanovic@gmx.at>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Stephan Pickering" <stefanpickering2002@yahoo.com>
Sent: Saturday, August 24, 2002 1:00 PM

> 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.

At the moment the PhyloCode is a draft (www.phylocode.org), and it won't be
implemented before people have reached a consensus on what to do with
species names. I hear you giggling... you are correct. Apart from the 13
methods proposed in the Cantino et al. paper*, about 2 or 3 of which are
being defended in very slow discussions (have a look at
http://phylocode.miketaylor.org.uk, which also explains those methods),
there are some more, like not making species mandatory (attractive, IMHO,
especially for fossil species, for many of which only one or very few
individuals are known and all species concepts except sometimes the
morphological one fail) or abandoning them altogether (by assuming they are
as unreal as all other ranks).

* Method M happens to be the one of those that I like most. I hope I don't
have such influence on this list that everyone thinks now it's practically
already official...