RE: Sereno's (2005) new definitions

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

Nick Pharris (pharris@umich.edu) wrote:

<Or we could correct that first one once and for all...>

  I beleive this bit of correctiveness may be more damaging than positive,
especially in names corresponding through time. All -opsi- taxon names proposed
thus far would be changed (to -opi-), and say you needed to cearch through
databases (say, PubMed) for papers corresponding to these. Unlike names like
Hadrosauridae, we would find a failure to recover the neccessary papers we are
interested. Unlike other names, we could attach other criteria, such as
(Ceratopsia orig. Ceratopsia) with modifiers to indicate someone renamed the
taxon. Then again, this is a unique set of letters corresponding to a name, and
as the case with *Kentrosaurus* vs *Centrosaurus* which led partly to the mess
providing *Eucentrosaurus*, we can see the importance of one letter difference
in distinguishing taxa. I would thus argue we would be naming an entirely new
taxon, even if we were nominally only revising an old one, and the new authors
would be credited with the correspondence to the taxon name, rather than the
old authors, though they commited a grammatical error or perpetuated one. We
are thankful for Leptoceratopidae, at least.

  Cheers,

Jaime A. Headden

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


                
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