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

[Tim Williams <tijawi@gmail.com>]

Paul P <turtlecroc@yahoo.com> wrote:

> The ICZN allows lots of things, and it prohibits lots of others. When you 
> step back and look at it as a whole, it works pretty well. Much of it is 
> common sense.
>
> Can you imagine the chaos if names could be changed at will..? All of 
> taxonomy would quickly become a huge mess. It's important to have 
> nomenclatural
> stability (at any level, but especially species). However, removing a species 
> from one genus to another isn't a big deal at all. S. ovatus becomes R. 
> ovatus.
> Styracosaurus still is what it was (S. albertensis). Nor does that actually 
> change its name--it's simply moving it from one clade (Styracosaurus) to 
> another
> (Rubeosaurus).

Indeed.  It's worth adding that a name (such as _Styracosaurus
ovatus_) is attached to a certain specimen (the holotype).  So the
name goes wherever that specimen goes.  As everyone knows (especially
Paul), _Styracosaurus ovatus_ is a current example of changing
taxonomy:  In 2010, _S. ovatus_ was assigned to its own genus
(_Rubeosaurus_) by McDonald &. Horner, because their phylogenetic
analysis no longer found _S. ovatus_ to be the sister taxon to
_Styracosaurus albertensis_ (the type species of _Styracosaurus_).
Thus, _S. ovatus_ became _Rubeosaurus ovatus_.  This was reversed by
Wilson et al. (2020) who, based on the holotype alone, recovered _S.
ovatus_ (= _R. ovatus_) to be the sister taxon to  _S. albertensis_;
so _Rubeosaurus_ became a subjective junior synonym of
_Styracosaurus_.  (This same study nominated a specimen previously
referred to _Rubeosaurus ovatus_ to be the holotype of a new
ceratopsian genus and species, named _Stellasaurus ancellae_.)

Throughout all this, the name _S. ovatus_ remained fixed to a single
specimen.  This cannot change (unless the ICZN decides otherwise, in
response to a petition).  If a future study finds _S. ovatus_ once
again to represent a distinct genus, then that genus must be called
_Rubeosaurus_.  As Paul says, all this is common sense.  The
nomenclature remains stable, even if the taxonomy changes over time.
This aspect of the ICZN Code works quite well.