Re: Dinosaur Genera List update #186

[Dinogeorge@aol.com]

In a message dated 5/2/02 7:53:04 AM Pacific Daylight Time, mike@tecc.co.uk 
writes:

<< But as Kevin Coster was once told, "If you ignore them, they will go
 away", no?  Wouldn't that be better?  As Jamie's original message
 points out, "These [names] are [...] completely, utterly useless to
 science." >>

Once a name is published, it has a nasty habit of showing up unbidden. Also, 
would it not be interesting to know whether paleontologists such as Seeley, 
Owen, Cope, and Marsh had considered other names for their fossils before 
publishing the names they eventually did? This kind of information is not 
usually available in the scientific literature, and when it appears in the 
popular literature it deserves to be preserved. For example, it was going to 
be Utahraptor spielbergi before it became Utahraptor ostrommaysorum. The 
former name appeared only in a Walt Disney digest article, as far as I know. 
And Barnum Brown was going to name Kritosaurus Nectosaurus, until he learned 
that Nectosaurus had been used a few years earlier for an aquatic reptile and 
had to choose another name.