Re: Dinosaur a tecnical term; fish is not (was RE: Fish with milk (Sheesh spinoff))

[John Wilkins <j.wilkins1@uq.edu.au>]

On 27/10/2006, at 2:17 PM, evelyn sobielski wrote:

> > But as I understand it, not being a taxonomist
> > myself, we no longer
> > require that the type species is the most "typical"
> > of the genus.
>
> Common fallacy - it never really was like that. The
> type taxon is a label-bearer, nothing more and nothing
> less. The initial idea may have been to choose type
> taxa that are "typical", but it was quickly abandoned
> as uttlery unworkable b/c it turned out that it could
> not be foreseen which taxa would eventually come to be
> placed in a genus and thus it was impossible to tell
> whether one of the known ones was "typical".

Of course, but you just contradicted yourself in the space of one  
sentence. It *was* like that (and if memory serves, that's what  
Linnaeus tried to do). Yes it was unworkable pretty quickly, but that  
is what typology was about.
> Neither have holotypes to be in any way "typical".
> They, too, are something to which the name is
> permanently attached (barring complete invalidation,
> which is not simply placing-into-synonymy).

I think that type specimens came a bit later, around the end of the  
18thC.
> So "Limnornis" as described by Kessler & Jurcsak in
> 1984 was a number of dinosaur (possibly avian) bones
> and the holotype was a partial femur. However,
> Limnornis is already in use (for some SAm suboscines)
> and hence the genus name had to be replaced. They
> ultimately had to settle for Palaeocursonis, because
> the Eurolimnornis they originally would have wanted
> was validly described by them - and attached to a
> humerus from their "Limnornis" material, which turned
> out to be from another critter.
>
> Eike
>
>
>
> 	
> 		
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--
John S. Wilkins, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Biohumanities Project
University of Queensland - Blog: evolvethought.blogspot.com
"Darwin's theory has no more to do with philosophy than any other
hypothesis in natural science." Tractatus 4.1122