Re: Taxa nomy?

[SeanSt8579@aol.com]

In a message dated 3/10/04 12:16:20 AM Eastern Standard Time, Hall966@msn.com 
writes:

<< Forgive me for the amateur question, but if species were abandoned how 
would a new organism be labelled?  What would we call it when talking about it 
(what would be in a name at this point?)?  Or is this question totally 
premature? >>

Least Inclusive Taxonomic Units. To quote Pleijel and Rouse:

"Identification of taxa as LITUs are statements about the current state of 
knowledge (or lack thereof ) without implying that they have no internal nested 
structure; we simply do not know if a given LITU consists of several 
monophyletic groups or not. In order to make them readily identifiable, we 
further 
suggest that LITUs be written with all lowercase letters, whereas all other, 
more 
inclusive taxon names have an initial capital letter (figure 3)."

So for example, to the extent that there are no known monophyletic 
subdivisions of the specimens we know as Microraptor gui, we can call this 
assemblage 
the LITU microraptor (or whatever). If they were ever discovered to form 
monophyletic subgroups, "microraptor" is shifted to a capitalized 
"Microraptor", and 
the smaller subdivisions get new, lower-case LITU names.

Thats their proposal, anyway.