"Selling" species

[GHaszprunar]

Dear Taxacomer´s,

in order to clear up the story about "selling species" some informations:

(1) As outlined first in Nature some time ago (1997: Nature 386: 641) there
is no "selling": BIOPAT (its institutions and scientists) honour genereous
donators, who provided a lot of money for investigating the hitherto unknown
biodiversity on earth (50 % of the money will go into the countries where
the organisms have been found). Since a-taxonomy still has the (entirely
obsolete and wrong) image to be "only descriptive" by many science
foundations, this idea is eagerly necessary to get necessary funding for a
long-lasting neglected discipline and to get attention by those countries
where the majority of their fauna and flora unknown.

(2) The neogastropod snail "Bufonaria borisbeckeri" was named 1996 by an
amateur taxonomist, who is a fan of the tennis-star. This naming had and has
nothing to do with BIOPAT, the correlation is pure "journalism".

With kind regards

Gerhard Haszprunar

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Prof. Dr. Gerhard HASZPRUNAR
Zoologische Staatssammlung Muenchen
Muenchhausenstrasse 21
D-81247 Muenchen, GERMANY
e-mail: haszi at zi.biologie.uni-muenchen.de
http://www.zsm.mwn.de
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