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

[Paul P <turtlecroc@yahoo.com>]

It can be a bit confusing, but no more so than removing a taxon from one clade 
to another. It might be helpful to think of genera as small clades, so when 
"Diplodocus hayi" becomes "Galeamopus hayi", "hayi" is simply switching clades. 
That's not quite correct, of course, since names are binomial (genus + 
species). Part of the confusion may be that duplicate species names are 
allowed, e.g. Achelousaurus horneri, Oohkotokia horneri, and Daspletosaurus 
horneri. If we couldn't do that, we'd have to coin things like "Horneria" and 
"Horneraptor" as genus names.

So in that sense, Mike is right that the name really is being changed when a 
species is moved to a different genus. Binomial names are, at least to some 
degree, single names. At the same time, two names (genus + species) implies a 
hierarchy. Making any fundamental changes to that system at this point would 
cause far more confusion than it would eliminate.



On Monday, June 22, 2020, 09:24:26 AM UTC, Mike Taylor <sauropoda@gmail.com> 
wrote:

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.