dinosaur@usc.edu

[bh480@scn.org]

To: dinosaur@usc.edu
From: Ben Creisler (bh480@scn.org)
Subject: dinosaur@usc.edu

Thanks to my desperate pleading, I was able to get 
photocopies
of Hou's now out-of-print book "Mesozoic Birds of China," 
and have
begun translating some of the descriptions.  The process 
is proving
more laborious than usual because the book was published in
Taiwan and uses the old unsimplified versions of the 
Chinese
characters. When I took courses in Chinese many years ago,
I learned the "easy" simplified versions now standard on 
mainland
China. Sorting out the radicals and other details of some 
of the more
complex characters is a bit of an adjustment.

My first effort has been to straighten out the situation 
with Jibeinia. The
name appears in the caption of two plates (a drawing of 
the skeleton
and a photo of the holotype) as Jibeinia luanhera. 
Jibeinia is also given
as a label in an illustration comparing of the digits of 
different taxa.
However, the actual text never uses the Latin name 
Jibeinia and instead
only gives the Chinese version ("Ji Bei bird"). Hou 
provides a fairly detailed
description on pages 99-110, based on a nearly complete 
skeleton, and
has a table indicating the size of various bones. It is 
described
as a Confuciusornis-like bird (but with teeth) from the 
Yixian Formation
near Fengning in northern Hebei Province. Hou dates it to 
the Late
Jurassic, but the Yixian is now considered Early 
Cretaceous.
The sticky nomenclatural issue is how to cite the name 
Jibeinia. Under
ICZN rules (1985 edition), Jibeinia luanhera is not an 
available name--that is,
it has not been published in a way that makes it valid for 
use in scientific
literature. Merely being cited in the caption of an 
illustration doesn't cut it--
Hou needed to give the formal Latin name in the text of 
the description itself.
Technically, the name would be a nomen nudum even though a 
perfectly 
adequate description has been published (though Hou does 
not give the
holotype catalog number). I guess the best solution for 
now is to put
"Jibeinia luanhera" in quotations to show that it is not 
official.

Is anyone aware of a more recent description of Jibeinia 
that would satisfy
the ICZN requirements? Hou's book (as well as much Chinese 
paleoliterature) 
has not been indexed by the Zoological Record or Biosis, 
so I can't use
either of them as a resource.