The "A." paper keeps giving me "server error" messages, but
the PMC copy definitely does not contain any evidence of having been registered. So thanks for finding it. Have any Mesozoic birds been published in Sci. Rep.?
Also checked all the dinosaur taxa from the other potential journal to have this issue, Nature Communications, but they are very consistent and always have a Nomenclatural Acts section. So it's really just Scientific Reports that dropped the ball, which is odd since both are owned by Nature.
That is odd!
As for the petition, I think it's still good to have a method to weed out anyone who can make a pdf available online. What about changing things so that the journal itself could be registered to the ZooBank database, and thus anything published in the journal would be valid?
That's a very good idea.
And in the meantime, maybe contact the authors for a mass petition to the ICZN to make their Scientific Reports names available retroactively,
I'm about to count the authors so I can make clear how far this issue is from a lone taxonomic vandal... but it's a lot! Contacting all of them would take months.
plus contacting the Scientific Reports editors to tell them they need to start enforcing this stuff in the future?
That's a megajournal with hundreds of editors, so I'd need to write to someone higher up in the hierarchy. In my experience, people above the editor level never respond to anything. And if the petition actually goes through, they won't need to enforce the current rule anymore...