Gesendet: Samstag, 13. Juni 2020 um 14:51 Uhr
Von: "dawidmazurek@wp.pl" <dawidmazurek@wp.pl>
Some further thoughts. I don't know if and when my Department is going tu purchase a copy (or copies) of the two books. It's hard to be part of a revolution if you don't know the rules. Many might face this.
The full text of the Code is here, of course: http://phylonames.org/code/
While the full text of Phylonyms isn't available for free, the names & definitions are registered, which means you can find them here: https://www.phyloregnum.org/ – that's a beta version, the links to other pages of the full list don't work yet, but the search engine does work.
Both of these links are in the press release, which is why I didn't post them separately! :-)
In any way, a lot of depends on the journals. I know that Comptes Rendus Palevol is pro, for example, but still allows traditional nomenclature:
Of course nobody is under any illusions that rank-based nomenclature will just disappear overnight. Even more importantly, the PhyloCode only covers the naming of clades, not of species, so if you want to name a new species and get people to treat that as valid you still have to pick the appropriate rank-based code. (Plans to develop a new Species Code were abandoned as currently impractical.)
However, this division of labor has a great advantage. Under the vast majority of species concepts, the boundaries of clades and species don't have to coincide. The great step forward under the PhyloCode is that we don't need to pretend they do. Phylogenetic nomenclature is the naming of clades; rank-based nomenclature is the classifying of species.
Under rank-based nomenclature we can't classify an organism without first referring it to a named species (whether we name the species in the same process or it was named earlier). This is not necessary under the PhyloCode: specimens not referred to a species can be used directly in the definitions of clade names. We don't need to pretend anymore that we can meaningfully apply a species concept to a bunch of old bones. We can also name clades that might lie inside species or cut across several species under whatever species concept.
In the research on Mesozoic dinosaurs, and much else of vertebrate paleontology, it is usually the genus rank that is applied to the smallest recognizable clades, and species names are an afterthought added to honor colleagues or make clever puns with. Now we won't have to double up all names anymore.