TAXONOMIC NOMENCLATURE

[TOM BUCKLEY]

I am fortunate to have a copy of Erich Rose's New York Paleontological Society Fossil Collecting Primer. In it is a detailed section on how to correctly name your fossils according to accepted taxonomic nomenclature. 

A question I have had is the correct way to name a fossil which includes the author's name and date. Gypidula coeymanensis. Is Schubert, 1913 placed right after the species name, separated by a comma such as Gypidula coeymanensis, Schubert, 1913? And what if the genus was authored by someone different? Would this be appropriate? Gypidula, Jones, 1910 coeymanensis, Schubert, 1913. 

 

Tom

[DPS Ammonite]

Standard form (no comma): Gypidula coeymanensis  Schubert, 1913.

 

No need to add author of genus. If species was moved to new genus then you put author and date into parenthesis:   Gypidula coeymanensis (Schubert, 1913).

 

See IZCN code: 

https://www.iczn.org/the-code/the-international-code-of-zoological-nomenclature/

Edited May 28, 2020 by DPS Ammonite

[TOM BUCKLEY]

7 minutes ago, DPS Ammonite said:

Standard form (no comma): Gypidula coeymanensis  Schubert, 1913.

 

No need to add author of genus. If species was moved to new genus then you put author and date into parenthesis:   Gypidula coeymanensis (Schubert, 1913).

 

See IZCN code: 

https://www.iczn.org/the-code/the-international-code-of-zoological-nomenclature/

 

Thanks. Is the author and date in parenthesis the original author or the author of the new genus?

 

Tom

[DPS Ammonite]

12 minutes ago, TOM BUCKLEY said:

 

Thanks. Is the author and date in parenthesis the original author or the author of the new genus?

 

Tom

The name and date after a binomial is always the author of the species.

[Coco]

8 hours ago, TOM BUCKLEY said:

 

Thanks. Is the author and date in parenthesis the original author or the author of the new genus?

 

Tom

If I’m not saying any nonsense, when the name of the author and the date are in brackets, the gender name has changed and the author is the one who determined the original genus. Isn’t that right? Correct me if I’m wrong.

 

Coco

[DPS Ammonite]

10 minutes ago, Coco said:

If I’m not saying any nonsense, when the name of the author and the date are in brackets, the gender name has changed and the author is the one who determined the original gender. Isn’t that right? Correct me if I’m wrong.

 

Coco

The author and date whether or not in parenthesis placed a species in its original generic name such as Gryphea. 
 

When an author and date are in parenthesis (), it only means that the species has been placed in another genus. It does not tell anything about who described the new or old genus. Sometimes an author will describe a new species and the new genus that it is in; only research will tell. 

 

 

[Coco]

 

Coco

[FossilDAWG]

Including the name of the person who first named a species, and the year of publication, clarifies the intended application of the species name.  In earlier times (and also still today to a lesser extent) it sometimes happened that two different authors would describe different species using the same name (assigning them to the same genus), the later one being unaware that the specific name they chose had already been used.  For example, the earlier name might have been published in a document that had limited circulation, so the second author never had a chance to see the first publication.  Or a name might still be "in press" when the second is published. (In press means the manuscript has been reviewed and accepted, but hasn't been printed yet. Sometime papers might wait as long as a year or more between when they are accepted and when they actually appear in print.)  In such cases you could end up with two different species within a genus having exactly the same name.  (Note: the valid name is the first to appear in print).  This situation was more common than you might think back in the days before the internet, especially back when paleontology publications were often huge monographs with lithographs that took years to prepare.  An author might complete the text several years before the publication became available.  Having the author and year clarifies which name is which, and it facilitates figuring out which one is valid.  If the second name to be published actually refers to a valid species, different from the first, then that species has to be given a new name.

 

The brackets indicate if the species was initially described under a different genus, and so it notifies taxonomists that they need to be looking for a different genus name if they look up the original publication.  It doesn't have anything to do with gender.  (Only the French really care about gender, it seems to me.  I mean, does a table leg really have to be male or female? )

 

Don

[DPS Ammonite]

13 minutes ago, FossilDAWG said:

(Only the French really care about gender, it seems to me.  I mean, does a table leg really have to be male or female? )

 

Don

How many members refer to their boats that they collect fossils with as she?

https://www.boatsafe.com/boats-referred/

[FossilDAWG]

Well sure!  But that's a boat!

Don

[siteseer]

5 hours ago, FossilDAWG said:

The brackets indicate if the species was initially described under a different genus, and so it notifies taxonomists that they need to be looking for a different genus name if they look up the original publication.  It doesn't have anything to do with gender.  (Only the French really care about gender, it seems to me.  I mean, does a table leg really have to be male or female? )

 

Don

 

Hi Don,

 

I know you're joking but I think all the Romance languages have masculine and feminine nouns.  As someone who took French in high school and college, it was tough sometimes to remember which ones were which, but it was okay, the teacher was quick to correct me.

 

And then there's German, which has three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter.  The extra level of complexity was that the adjective modifying the noun always had to agree in gender and number and this was done with a set of different word ending suffixes.  Anyone who has described a species understands that the genus and species have to agree as well as determined by word ending suffixes.  

 

I heard that there is at least one other language that has four genders.  

 

Jess

[Coco]

14 hours ago, FossilDAWG said:

It doesn't have anything to do with gender.  (Only the French really care about gender, it seems to me.  I mean, does a table leg really have to be male or female? )

 

Don

I don’t know if you wrote that in reference to my intervention, but I didn’t talk about sex. It is true that the word "genus" and the word "gender" are translated in the same way in French : "genre".

 

It is also true that in less than a minute I had edited my post because the translator had written me "gender" instead of "genus". I had to correct...

 

Coco

[FossilDAWG]

Coco, I was just teasing you a little.  I'm sorry that I offended you as that was not at all my intent.

 

I was not aware that in French culture the taxonomic term "genus" is the same as gender.  That seems to have the potential to cause lots of confusion.

 

Don

[jdp]

The reason we append the author name to the taxon name is because doing so tells the reader exactly where to find the original definition of that species, including the specimen number of the holotype, the type locality and horizon, the etymology, and the diagnosis. Most references to species in scientific writing do not contain full authority; we mostly make those references to full authority only when discussing the taxonomic status of a name.

[pierrette]

Hi

Jokes apart, I would like to make some remarks on the importance of gender and genus in taxonomical nomenclature. Gender does matter in binomial names as the genus name is  made up of  a  noun in Latin,  which can be masculine, feminine or neuter, and the species name, which is usually an adjective that has to match the gender of the genus name. Adjectives in Latin can have one form for all three genders, two or three. Many times in the taxonomical history of a genus we find that the species was transferred to another genus but the form of of the adjective was not adapted to the gender of the new genus, which can lead to misunderstandings. For example,  we can find  Cyclolites polymorpha  (Goldfuss, 1826) , a coral, named like that on many websites while on others it appears as Cyclolites polymorphus (Goldfuss, 1826)  Why? Which one is correct (leaving asside the controversies about the genus )? Well, the clue is the gender. The original designation in Goldfuss was  Fungia polymorpha, where Fungia is a femenine noun and polymorpha the femenine form of the adjective. Cyclolites is masculine. However, Milne Edwards and Haime (1860) did not adapt the adjective to the gender of the new genus when they stated that the species was not a Fungia but a Cyclolites, so they left the species name as it was. Later on, it was adapted. 

Another example is Velates perversus (Gmelin 1791) whose original designation was  Nerita perversa, and that is way we can see Velates perversa  so frequently in forums all over the internet. WORMS  database  gives information on the gramatical gender of genera http://www.marinespecies.org/aphia.php?p=taxdetails&id=1307206 

 

Hope all that can be useful to someone

Regards

[erose]

On 5/28/2020 at 7:30 AM, TOM BUCKLEY said:

I am fortunate to have a copy of Erich Rose's New York Paleontological Society Fossil Collecting Primer. In it is a detailed section on how to correctly name your fossils according to accepted taxonomic nomenclature. 

Tom

Oh my gosh I wrote that so long ago. Late 90's I think. I wrote it because I was learning about that stuff as I cataloged my collection and had to track down descriptions all of my New York Devonian and Ohio Ordovician material.  Both were well studied but in the last two centuries so many of the species have had their genus reassigned.  I still find I sometimes need to track down the original description to nail the identity of a fossil. This is actually getting easier as more old and obscure journals are being digitized.

 

[FossilDAWG]

1 hour ago, pierrette said:

Hi

Jokes apart, I would like to make some remarks on the importance of gender and genus in taxonomical nomenclature. Gender does matter in binomial names as the genus name is  made up of  a  noun in Latin,  which can be masculine, feminine or neuter, and the species name, which is usually an adjective that has to match the gender of the genus name. ..

That is helpful.  I have to say though that changing the trivial name when the genus changes can produce even more confusion.  I work with a mosquito called Aedes albopictus (amongst others).  Several years ago a mosquito taxonomist raised all the subgenera of Aedes to full genera, and in several cases that changed the gender and so he also adjusted the species name.  Aedes albopictus became Stegomyia albopictum.  That means that everyone who works with that mosquito has to be aware of and understand that Aedes albopictus and Stegomyia albopictum are exactly the same species.  If you do not realize that, then you might miss every paper ever published before the name change (of which there are thousands).  Most people in the field are medical entomologists, molecular biologists, physiologists, ecologists, specialists in mosquito-borne diseases, etc.  A small handful are actual mosquito taxonomists who would directly know of the change due to their work.  Many other medically important mosquitoes had a similar name change.  For a while people used both names, or one or the other, so the literature is a bit confused in that regard.  You have to use both names if you are searching the literature for papers relevant to your research.  Then, to make it even more confusing, a different taxonomist re-examined the Aedes group and decided all the subgroups really are not different enough to be called different genera, so they all got put back into Aedes and the names all changed back, much to the relief of all the non-taxonomists.

 

I have also been hearing for a while that the genus Drosophila is being split up, and so the name of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster will change.  I can't imagine how confusing that will be, as much of the field of genetics is based on Drosophila melanogaster.

 

Don

[DPS Ammonite]

Here is the premiere guide for creating valid species names from the ICZN (I should chuck most of  my years of Latin out the window):

 

https://www.iczn.org/assets/92273ee2d1/Formation_of_names.pdf

 

http://dml.cmnh.org/2009Nov/msg00067.html

 

The best site to search for the current and correct name for fossils is Fossilworks: 

 

http://fossilworks.org/

[jdp]

20 minutes ago, FossilDAWG said:

That is helpful.  I have to say though that changing the trivial name when the genus changes can produce even more confusion.  I work with a mosquito called Aedes albopictus (amongst others).  Several years ago a mosquito taxonomist raised all the subgenera of Aedes to full genera, and in several cases that changed the gender and so he also adjusted the species name.  Aedes albopictus became Stegomyia albopictum.  That means that everyone who works with that mosquito has to be aware of and understand that Aedes albopictus and Stegomyia albopictum are exactly the same species.  If you do not realize that, then you might miss every paper ever published before the name change (of which there are thousands).  Most people in the field are medical entomologists, molecular biologists, physiologists, ecologists, specialists in mosquito-borne diseases, etc.  A small handful are actual mosquito taxonomists who would directly know of the change due to their work.  Many other medically important mosquitoes had a similar name change.  For a while people used both names, or one or the other, so the literature is a bit confused in that regard.  You have to use both names if you are searching the literature for papers relevant to your research.  Then, to make it even more confusing, a different taxonomist re-examined the Aedes group and decided all the subgroups really are not different enough to be called different genera, so they all got put back into Aedes and the names all changed back, much to the relief of all the non-taxonomists.

 

I have also been hearing for a while that the genus Drosophila is being split up, and so the name of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster will change.  I can't imagine how confusing that will be, as much of the field of genetics is based on Drosophila melanogaster.

 

Don

Personally, I think this is a point on which the ICZN is rapidly failing to do its job of maintaining stable unambiguous biological nomenclature, and we're likely facing a situation where the nomenclatural system is going to collapse. Rules based on how Carl von Linne wrote up species names and descriptions in Latin at a time when everything was written in Latin are a problem when there's a desperate need for stable taxonomy. The ICZN ha also failed over and over to preserve stable taxonomy in cases where there is a massive literature that is not taxonomy-adjacent, such as genetics (your Drosophila example, or similar examples with Xenopus and Danio) or public health (your Aedes example). While there is a need for rules and standards, these are situations where the ICZN is trying to show they have power over other fields and that's just not an appropriate reason to do anything.

[DPS Ammonite]

23 minutes ago, jdp said:

Personally, I think this is a point on which the ICZN is rapidly failing to do its job of maintaining stable unambiguous biological nomenclature, and we're likely facing a situation where the nomenclatural system is going to collapse. Rules based on how Carl von Linne wrote up species names and descriptions in Latin at a time when everything was written in Latin are a problem when there's a desperate need for stable taxonomy. The ICZN ha also failed over and over to preserve stable taxonomy in cases where there is a massive literature that is not taxonomy-adjacent, such as genetics (your Drosophila example, or similar examples with Xenopus and Danio) or public health (your Aedes example). While there is a need for rules and standards, these are situations where the ICZN is trying to show they have power over other fields and that's just not an appropriate reason to do anything.

Are you arguing that the rules regarding formation of species names using Latinized names should be relaxed? In other words, we should allow for a wider range of names that do not strictly adhere to traditional Latin naming conventions? I think that you are arguing that the stability of names such as melanogaster is more important than stringent adherence to the Latin naming rules that would require that melanogaster be changed.

 

Please clarify your position.

[FossilDAWG]

I'm reminded of one of my favorite quotes from Rousseau Flower, long-time expert on Paleozoic cephalopods and Ordovician corals (who passed away several years ago).  In a work on Montoya Group corals, at a part where he was wrestling with the nomenclatural history of a coral genus in which the holotype of the type species had been lost, it was from glacial drift anyway so no solid data on the age or source formation, the original description was really poor, the illustration was worse, and there were other issues as well, he wrote in frustration: "After all, paleontology should be about the study of fossils, not the study of names of fossils".  At that point he solved the problem by restricting the use of the old name from the literature to the lost holotype specimen, and created a new name (Favistina) based on a well described species with an excellent holotype from a well documented locality, so everybody (who works on Ordovician corals) knows exactly what Favistina is.

 

Stability can mean different things to different people I suppose.  In the Drosophila example, the type species of the genus, Drosophila funebris, is in the subgenus Drosophila by definition (so the full name is Drosophila (Drosophila) funebris).  Drosophila melanogaster is in a different subgenus, Sophophora.  There are over 2,000 named species and dozens of subgenera in the genus Drosophila, and modern taxonomic analysis indicates that the genus is not monophyletic, so it will have to be split up.  An application was made to the ICZN to change the type species to Drosophila melanogaster so that name would not change no matter how the genus is split, but that was rejected.  The ICZN voted for "stability" in the sense of preserving the existing type species for the genus over "stability" in the sense of not changing the name of a species that is the subject of tens of thousands of published papers.  At any rate probably nothing will change soon as there is no agreement yet about how to divide the genus into smaller monophyletic subgenera.

 

Isn't taxonomy fun??

 

Don

[TOM BUCKLEY]

2 hours ago, erose said:

Oh my gosh I wrote that so long ago. Late 90's I think. I wrote it because I was learning about that stuff as I cataloged my collection and had to track down descriptions all of my New York Devonian and Ohio Ordovician material.  Both were well studied but in the last two centuries so many of the species have had their genus reassigned.  I still find I sometimes need to track down the original description to nail the identity of a fossil. This is actually getting easier as more old and obscure journals are being digitized.

 

 

I routinely refer to the nomenclature section.

 

Tom

[Coco]

9 hours ago, FossilDAWG said:

Coco, I was just teasing you a little.  I'm sorry that I offended you as that was not at all my intent.

 

Don’t worry, Don, I’m not offended at all. This is a very interesting topic and I look forward to reading more.

As you can see with "gender" or "genus" (and stranger /foreigner), being French-speaking on this forum is not always easy !

 

Coco

[jdp]

4 hours ago, DPS Ammonite said:

Are you arguing that the rules regarding formation of species names using Latinized names should be relaxed? In other words, we should allow for a wider range of names that do not strictly adhere to traditional Latin naming conventions? I think that you are arguing that the stability of names such as melanogaster is more important than stringent adherence to the Latin naming rules that would require that melanogaster be changed.

 

Please clarify your position.

I'm arguing both. The point of having rules for nomenclature is that when I use a name, people know what that name is. Strict adherence to the gender declension of species names is actually a problem when it obscures consistency of nomenclature.

 

The same applies to priority. Priority normally serves to maintain consistency of name usage, but in some cases it simply doesn't. There are ~700,000 papers indexed by google scholar that use the name "Drosophila melanogaster" and most of the people working with this animal simply do not care about taxonomy nor do they have any background in taxonomy. Stability of nomenclature for that animal (and for zebrafish and other lab model organisms) is paramount. Making the decision to split up Drosophila and revive another genus to accommodate D. melanogaster is just someone being edgy for the sake of being edgy. It doesn't preserve consistency of name usage and does not protect the stability of the name in the literature. All it does is ###### off a bunch of geneticists, cell biologists, and developmental biologists.

[erose]

Without doing all the quotes I want to agree that in my opinion the need to make genus and species genders agree is antiquated and problematic in this day and age.  Internet or even internal document searches will miss this stuff.  How on earth is this going to really work with all the new non-latin/greek species being erected by the Chinese and other non-western researchers?