RE: New Dinosauricon Taxon Pages: _Therizinosauria_

["T. Michael Keesey" <mightyodinn@yahoo.com>]

--- Nick Pharris <npharris@umich.edu> wrote:
> Quoting "T. Michael Keesey" <mightyodinn@yahoo.com>:
> 
> > But species are not always guaranteed to stay in "their" genera (this case
> > aside). Non-type species move about all the time, which is good because it 
> > can reflect the latest thinking, but is bad for trying to achieve stability
> > with "genus + species" combinations.
> 
> So don't try to make them stable.

It seems to me that stability of nomenclature (but flexibility of phylogeny) is
a good thing; do you think otherwise?

> The binomen can simply be the lowest two 
> clades to which a given species belongs (OK, I'd want a redundant clade in 
> there for species with no close relatives).

The "trivial" part would presumably represent a species, not a clade. (e.g.
_arctos_ Linnaeus 1758 is a species, but since it does not include certain
descendants, placed in _maritimus_ Phipps 1774, it is not a clade.)

And what happens when two homonymous species are referred to the same
daughterless clade? (Especially if there is disagreement about one of the
referrals.)

> I don't think there's any point in trying to make the species the unique 
> identifier, when from the beginning species names were never meant to be 
> unique.

Simply because something was meant from the beginning does not mean it is
useful, or even rational. I do agree that any new system should have a fair
degree of "backwards-compatibility", but I don't see that the system I am
currently employing on my site is not "backwards-compatible".

=====
=====> T. Michael Keesey <keesey@bigfoot.com>
=====> The Dinosauricon <http://dinosauricon.com>
=====> BloodySteak <http://bloodysteak.com>
=====> Instant Messenger <Ric Blayze>
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