RE: Nomenclatural question

[Tim Williams <twilliams_alpha@hotmail.com>]

Christopher Taylor wrote:

> While off the top of
> my head I can't think of any occasion where a taxon ending '-formes' has
> been more inclusive than a corresponding taxon ending '-morpha', I don't
> really see any reason why this couldn't happen.

I can think of one example: Gliriformes and Glirimorpha.  Wouldn't you know 
it, it's those pesky mammals again.  Gliriformes is the stem group for 
Glires, and includes rodents, lagomorphs and a bunch of extinct taxa 
(including, according to a soon-to-be-published paper, the arctostylopids).  
Gliriformes is therefore more inclusive than Glirimorpha, a subgroup of 
rodents that includes dormice.  To be fair, Gliriformes was named with 
reference to Glires (named by Linnaeus, and later co-opted as the 
rodent+lagomorph "superorder"), whereas Glirimorpha was named with reference 
to the dormouse genus _Glis_, family Gliridae.

Gliriformes was proposed by Wyss and Meng (1996) - the same pair who came up 
with the truly awful moniker Lagomorphamorpha.  Blecchhh!

Cheers

Tim