> One of the Linnean system's main benefits is having ranks which > illustrate the magnitude or size of a grouping.
They pretend to illustrate the size of a group, but they do no such thing. There are families with one species, and there are families with seventeen thousand.
Ranks are actively misleading.
Lacerta (lizards; nowadays just sand lizards and kin) included caimans (Lacerta crocodilus) and salamanders (Lacerta salamandra).
All crocodylians were included in the species *Lacerta crocodilus*, hence its name, and all salamanders & newts were included in the species *Lacerta salamandra* till Linnaeus and his student Österdam described *Siren lacertina* in 1766.
However, one reason why Linnaeus's genera were so large was that the rank of family hadn't been invented yet. Kingdom, class, order, genus, species, variety -- this list was exhaustive, and Linnaeus even made a major (and majorly silly) philosophical point of having exactly five ranks below that of kingdom.
Simia (no longer used as a genus)
Do you happen to know why? It's a mystery to me -- *Simia* can't be a junior synonym of anything else!
(Can't think of any maniraptors assigned to Megalosaurus, but I'm probably forgetting something.)
IIRC, various isolated maniraptoran teeth were assigned to *Megalosaurus*. And *Velociraptor* was originally included in Megalosauridae, IIRC.