I see the issue with the species name has not been resolved.
First of all, the issue is real: graciles is not a random combination of letters, but intended to be an actual Latin word:
The issue is that gracil
es is plural. As I understand
ICZN Art. 11.9.1.1, this is automatically corrected to the singular – but which singular? gracil
es is specifically the masculine or feminine plural, so the masculine or feminine singular, gracil
is, seems like the obvious choice – but the neuter singular, gracil
e, occurs once in the paper:
Unfortunately, the authors have not followed
Recommendation 30A by explicitly choosing a grammatical gender for
Shangyang, so there is no further evidence in the paper. (Chinese itself lacks grammatical gender.)
Article 30.2.4 makes
Shangyang masculine, unless the one occurrence of "
Shangyang gracile" (quoted above) was intentional, in which case Art. 30.2.3 makes
Shangyang neuter instead.
I'm posting this here in public instead of contacting the authors because it isn't clear to me if the authors can even do anything, which is because it isn't clear to me what consequences the wording "must be" in Art. 11.9.1 really has. What happens if what must be isn't?
Is
gracile taken as correct and
graciles as an inconsequential error, as suggested by Art. 11.9.1.1, in which case the authors don't need to do anything? Is
graciles taken as intentional and
gracile as a typo, as possibly suggested by
Art. 32.5.1, in which case see below? Or is this considered unresolvable from the paper alone, so that a First Reviser is required by
Art. 24.2.3 and
Art. 32.2.1? (Obviously, the only ethical choice of First Revisers in the current situation would be the authors.)
If
graciles is taken as intentional and
gracile as a typo, does a correction happen automatically (in analogy to
Art. 31.2, say), in which case the authors don't need to do anything? Or is the wording "must be, or be treated as" in Art. 11.9.1 elastic enough that we're supposed to act as if
graciles were singular, in which case the authors
can't do anything? (Similarly weird things have happened. In Greek, ops is feminine; in Scientific, -ops as in
Triceratops or
Eryops is masculine because
Art. 30.1.4.3 simply says so.)
Perhaps we should simply stick to whatever version is registered in ZooBank, even though the Code nowhere says ZooBank has any authority to decide anything except whether an electronic publication is validly published? The paper
is, after all, registered. Strangely, the entry claims that the paper only contains one nomenclatural act, the erection of the genus
Shanyang Wang & Zhou, 2019. No species name is mentioned at all. If you click on the entry for the genus to see what its registered type species is, it says "Shangyang graciles"... so maybe that's intentional... but Art. 32.5.1 says that if we want to treat
gracile as a typo for
graciles, "clear evidence of an inadvertent error" must be present "in the original publication itself, without recourse to any external source of information" such as, no doubt, ZooBank. Back to square one.
I really need to somehow create the time to write a whole paper for the Bulletin of Zoological Nomenclature. This is after all not the only case where the Code is unclear enough to either potentially contradict itself or overlook some really existing situations entirely. (Off the top of my head, are page and volume numbers part of "content and layout" for the purpose of Art. 8.1.3.2, with huge implications?) Any help will be appreciated!
================
For the sake of completeness, the neuter plural would be gracilia. Just like gastrale, gastralia.
Gesendet: Mittwoch, 20. März 2019 um 00:29 Uhr
Von: "Ben Creisler" <bcreisler@gmail.com>
An: dinosaur-l@usc.edu
Betreff: Re: [dinosaur] Shangyang, new enantiornithine from Early Cretaceous of China (free pdf)
The paper is now free at this pdf link:
Ben Creisler
A new paper:
Shangyang graciles gen. et sp. nov.