Re: Fw: Most popular/common dinosaur misconceptions

["T. Michael Keesey" <keesey@gmail.com>]

On 8/21/06, don ohmes <d_ohmes@yahoo.com> wrote:
> I agree that rigorously defined terms are essential, and that definitions morph over time with increased understanding. But why mess with folks over words like "planet", "fish", or even "dinosaur"? Everybody knows what a fish is; sometimes they bite and sometimes they don't.

For the last time, nobody is messing with the word "fish". It's purely
an English vernacular term ,and nobody has even attempted to convert
its Latin counterpart, "Pisces", into a clade. (_Craniata_ and/or
_Vertebrata_ suffice well enough already.) "Dinosaur", OTOH, is a
vernacular form of a formal taxon, _Dinosauria_. And that taxon hasn't
been messed with so much as defined at last.

And "dinosaur" isn't a term that was borrowed by science from the lay
public, either. It was coined as a biological taxon, and the term
entered public usage from science, not the other way around. Should we
bend over backwards to appease a public who considers pterosaurs,
plesiosaurs, mastodons, crocodiles, and even trilobites more
"dinosaurian" than birds? What is there to benefit from this? How is
such a grouping scientifically useful at all?

> Continue to invent precise, (and hopefully) concise new terms to go with rigorous new definitions and new taxonomies, and move on by leaving fuzzy and traditional (albeit formerly scientific) terms to fuzzy, traditional usage.

But it's not "formerly scientific"; it's been scientific all along
(although not rigorously defined until relatively recently). That the
public at large has misconceptions about the term should not affect
the scientific nomenclature. Otherwise, we might as well classify
spiders as insects and limit _Animalia_ to tetrapods.
--
T. Michael Keesey
The Dinosauricon: http://dino.lm.com
Parry & Carney: http://parryandcarney.com