Re: [...] Archaeopteryx 10

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

> <That was because von Meyer wrote a) in German and b) a paper about the 
> feather
> -- in the last paragraph he goes like "oh, and a skeleton has just been
> discovered which could be called *Archaeopteryx*". It's all in the 
> archives:
> von Meyer designated the London specimen, not the feather, the holotype.>
>
>  Don't be too hasty on this interpretation. It is really, really ambiguous
> what von Meyer was referring to,

No, it's pretty clear.

http://dml.cmnh.org/2002Aug/msg00045.html

Unfortunately the link in there to the original quotes doesn't work anymore.

(If you wonder about the grammar of the first sentence, it's a too literal 
translation of the "present subjunctive" as in "so be it", which is used in 
German to express journalistic distance and spares us from writing "he said, 
she said" behind every paraphrased sentence.)

> and I've taken the premise in hand that von
> Meyer was not in the habit of designating that many "holotypes", merely
> collecting the feather and skeleton into a single animal, and granting the
> animal as collected the name of choice.

Still, he attached the name to the skeleton, not to the feather. It's not a 
valid designation of a holotype under today's rules, but still.

>  Confusion in the literature, regardless of an interpretation of lack of 
> such
> ambiguity, required not one, but TWO acts of suppression by the ICZN 
> separated
> by 30 years due to a fortuitious find in Holland.

Oh yes. Suppression of *Pterodactylus crassipes* was necessary to conserve 
*Archaeopteryx lithographica*. But that's another story.