| Indeed, Iâd happily ashcan *Oculudentavis*, *Limusaurus*, and *Sciurumimus*, too if I could.
You can see -aster in names like *Cotoneaster* âsimilar to *cotoneum*,â i.e. âquince-like.â
âNick Pharris On Dec 23, 2020, at 12:09 AM, Ethan Schoales <ethan.schoales@gmail.com> wrote:
ï Since when did "aster" mean "similar"?
(If it Abitusavis were Abituavis, at least the first part of the compound is supposed to end in a u, unlike Oculudentavis, since it's fourth-declension rather than second-declension.) Unlovely and/or wrongly formed:
Preposing simili- is a clunky way of trying to capture the meaning âsimilar to.â What happened to good old -oides (or the somewhat less common -aster)?
âAbitusavisâ is supposed to be derived from *abitus* âdepartureâ, but the -s in *abitus* isnât really part of the word: itâs a grammatical ending indicating case and number. If you really want âdeparture bird,â it would be *Abituavis*. What do you mean by that? Mickey Mortimer wrote: âJust as an example, I just checked Similiyanornis and Abitusavis that were described recently, and that's true for them. We would be losing a lot of names this way.â
No great loss, as far as those two are concerned. Ugh.
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