Re: [dinosaur] Teihivenator, new genus for "Laelaps" macropus

From skimming the paper, and taking into account that this isn't my specialty, it seems to me that the author shows very clearly that the material is diagnostic, and that careful investigation of fragments discovered long ago can pay off. Wonderful! We need more like this.

However, I don't think the new name is what the ICZN calls "available".

It isn't available from electronic publication, because there's no evidence in the paper (or indeed elsewhere in the journal, like the Author Guidelines) that the paper was registered in ZooBank; such evidence in the paper is required by ICZN Article 8.5.3. That means we need to wait for publication in ink on paper (Art. 8.4.1)* – if it ever comes. The journal's Information For Librarians reads in full:

We encourage research librarians to list this journal among their library's electronic journal holdings. As well, it may be worth noting that this journal's open source publishing system is suitable for libraries to host for their faculty members to use with journals they are involved in editing (see Open Journal Systems).

This sounds like the paper will never be printed, and the name needs to be published again. (That time, however, citing this paper for the diagnosis would be enough; the paper wouldn't need to be repeated wholesale.)

The upside is that this is an opportunity to improve the name itself. Venator isn't Greek as the paper explicitly claims, it's Latin, as you can already see from the fact that there's a V in it. Using an Arapaho word for a genus from New Jersey, when the Arapaho live in Colorado, Wyoming and more recently Nebraska and Oklahoma, is an odd choice.

Somebody should alert the author and the journal of all this. In the meantime, I'll ask an expert I happen to know whether turning "teihiihan" into "teihi" leaves us with something meaningful or is like turning "strong" into "stro". Also, the Arapaho language is famous in very small circles for not having any kind of "a"**, so I have to doubt whether "teihiihan" is even real... (Where the word "Arapaho" comes from is unclear, but it's not the Arapaho language, which also doesn't let words begin with a vowel.)

* I'm immediately reminded of Tototlmimus Serrano-Brañas, Torres-Rodríguez, Reyes-Luna, González-Ramírez & González-León, 2016, in Serrano-Brañas, Torres-Rodríguez, Reyes-Luna, González-Ramírez & González-León, 2015: paper published in 2015, name validly published when the paper was printed in 2016.

** "Remarkably, unlike more than 98% of the world's languages, Arapaho has no low vowels, such as /a/.^[2^1]"

By the way, the DOI 10.24896/jzbr.2017422 doesn't exist, at least not yet; at the bottom of the paper's abstract page it is given as "10.24896/10.24896/jzbr.2017422", which looks wrong and doesn't exist either.