Re: Suchosaurus, Baryonyx and Martinavis

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

> 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. :-)