Re: [dinosaur] Party like it's 1758!

[David Marjanovic <david.marjanovic@gmx.at>]

Gesendet:ÂDonnerstag, 18. Juni 2020 um 06:34 Uhr
Von:Â"Paul P" <turtlecroc@yahoo.com>

> > > Many taxa (species) do have multiple individuals referred to them, so 
> > > it's an over-generalization to say dinosaur palaeontology treats genera 
> > > as species.
> >
> > No â not when the individuals can't be morphologically distinguished (at 
> > least beyond what the authors consider individual variation within a 
> > species). Again: the smallest recognizable clades are usually formalized as 
> > genera in vertebrate paleontology, with a few exceptions like Cenozoic 
> > mammals.
>
> I'm not quite following this--are you saying we should be erecting formal 
> dinosaur subspecies? If you check any species-level analysis, you'll find 
> clades of individuals. You seem to be suggesting that Triceratops is really a 
> species, not a genus, with the three recognized species (one unnamed) 
> actually being subspecies..?

Not at all! I'm not saying "ought" here, I'm saying "is": in the great majority 
of cases, the smallest recognizable clades are given names of genus rank. 
*Triceratops* is an exception.

> > > Yeah I know, if they can interbreed, then they're not distinct species 
> > > (much less genera).
> >
> > Do the first-semester biology textbooks still use this particular species 
> > concept? Because hardly any taxonomists do.
>
> [...] I generally wouldn't use that definition, but my impression is that a 
> lot of people still do (maybe not in VP).

Because the occurrence of interbreeding is hard to check in the wild, the 
"Biological Species Concept" has almost never been used in reality even by 
neontologists. Some have tried to find morphological or other proxies for 
interbreeding, but that way they have generally just created whole new species 
concepts, which is why there are about 150 of them out there. My impression is 
that these days various "Phylogenetic" species concepts are most often used by 
neontologists (who then fight among each other over whether there should be 1, 
3, 4 or 8 species of extant giraffes, for instance), and of course phenetic 
ones, if any, by paleontologists.

> > 2) fairly little splitting, or lumping for that matter, is currently going 
> > on;
>
> See above--you must not be paying much attention to Ankylosauria. It's a 
> splitter-v-lumper war right now.

Guilty as charged.