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Re: Suchosaurus, Baryonyx and Martinavis



But when you convert a paraphyletic genus into a clade, you
change the names of the species that were included in it and are now
excluded (or vice versa).  You also make the names of species subject
to change under different phylogenetic hypotheses.  I think that this
is more than most Linnaeists will swallow.

But these same Linnaeists do that all the time. It happens all the time that someone changes the content of a genus, and thus the names of plenty of species, in order to make the genus monophyletic or to keep it so under changing phylogenetic hypotheses. Outside of botany at least, paraphyletic genera have largely fallen out of fashion. Off the top of my head, tiger and lion as examples: *Felis* oops *Panthera* oops *Neofelis* oops *Panthera tigris*... *Felis* oops *Panthera* oops *Leo* oops *Panthera leo*...


This does not change under the PhyloCode. What changes is that it takes away the possibility to split & lump genera, and thus change species names, when the phylogeny does _not_ change -- which is another thing that happens all the time today. The example most of us will be most familiar with is *Tarbosaurus*. But have a look at *Rana* and *Bufo*, where splitting has recently changed _many hundreds_ of species names when the subgenera of the former and the species groups of the latter were elevated to genus rank by Frost et al. (2006), and that includes species that live in western Europe, not only ones hidden in the Amazon rainforest and discovered 2 years ago. The Generic Brown Frog used to be *Rana ridibunda*, now it's *Pelophylax ridibundus*. Unless you lump it back -- which you have every right to.

The PhyloCode is still an improvement. :-)