importance of names

[Thomas G. Lammers]

Robin Panza's comments reminds me of the (possibly apocryphal) story of
a paper on the physiology of plant hormones that gave the scientific
binomial of oats (the drosophila of plant hormone research) as "Avena
coleoptile".

(For non-botanists, the coleoptile is the *plant structure* used in
classic oat hormone experiments).

Thomas G. Lammers
Department of Botany            lammers at tfm.fmnh.org
Field Museum of Natural History
Chicago IL 60605-2496 USA