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



On Sun, 21 Jun 2020 at 23:08, Paul P <turtlecroc@yahoo.com> wrote:
On Thursday, June 18, 2020, 09:10:21 AM UTC, Mike Taylor <sauropoda@gmail.com> wrote:

> > But there is a bias toward publishing manuscripts that name genera and not "just" species.
> Correct, and I am very much in favour of this for dinosaurs.

Are you suggesting that we can't hope to distinguish between dinosaur species (of a given genus) in the fossil record?

II am saying we came can hope (sometimes reasonably, sometimes forlornly) to distinguish dinosaur species; but that to to think we can say with any certainty which species belong in a given higher grouping is a fool's game. Many decades of experience have taught us this. Even if "genus" actually meant anything (which it doesn't), trying to assign species to them would be as error-prone as drawing any other kind of phylogenetic conclusion. And since genera alone contribute to what a species is _called_, it's sensible just to leave them out of the equation completely. (For other kinds of zoological taxonomists, e.g. extant malacologists, this may not be so; but I am not concerned with them.)

> then the name of the species will have to change to reflect it

They might end up being synonymized, but species names don't change. Or are you talking about new combos, e.g. moving a species to a different genus or creating a new genus name for it later..?

Exactly. "Galeamopus hayi" is a different name from "Diplodocus hayi", but they are both names for the same animal. This is unhelpful: ideal names are bijective (i.e. each taxon has one name and each name refers to one taxon). By having guessed that the species "hayi" belongs to the genus "Dipldocus", Holland (1924) put us in a position where we would have the change the name of his species. Now we needn't be too critical of what he did a century ago; but we also needn't copy his mistake.

-- Mike.


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