Basionym/Protologue

[Barry Roth]

This practice leads to taxon authorships that are correctly cited as, for example, "Jones in Schmidt, Lee, Hernandez, and Jones."  As a co-perpetrator of the heinous Greggelix (Martirelix) huertai Miller and Roth in Smith, Miller, Christensen and Roth, 1990, I probably should not point any fingers, but it does seem like a tax on label space and datakeeping resources.  I discourage the practice in the journal of which I am chief editor.  But I can also understand that ego might make a taxonomist not want to share credit in perpetuity with joint authors who may be, say (as in one actual case I dealt with), the pilot of the submersible which collected the type specimen.
Barry Roth
 Daniel Janzen wrote:[...] a team of people work up a paper on the biology of new species xx, and one of them is a taxonomist who actually describes the new species in THAT same paper, and is the sole author of the new name in that paper (even though the paper has multiple authors). In some sense, the entire paper may be viewed as the protologue, but the authorship of the species is just that one member of the team.


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