TurboTaxonomy?

Rodham E. Tulloss ret at PLUTO.NJCC.COM
Fri Aug 20 09:34:41 CDT 2004


I realize that in my first comment I conflated a number of issues with
the nomenclatural one.  Nice to have it off my chest, but irrelevant.
The nomenclatural errors that I have seen most commonly in recent years
are: naming two herbaria and saying all types declared in the given paper
are in one or the other of them...and never specifying which in any case
(at least two separate occurrences); creation of homonyms (half a dozen
occurrences); not listing the herbarium in which a type is located;
other insufficient designation of a type; designation of mulitple co-types;
failure to produce a Latin protologue; application of an out-of-date version
of the Code.

These errors largely were made by people who had not formally studied
the field in which they were publishing; however, the first listed (for
example) was made only by professionals with LONG careers behind them.
A checklist would have been very useful (and is cheap to create).

Nomenclators would be very valuable, but one can certainly understand
that few exist in mycology.  The history of old names is toruously complex
sometimes; the number of names can be very large in larger genera.  The
literature necessary for the research is sometimes rare.  Etc.

Even with decades of work by Dr. C. Bas (Leiden) and now another 8 years
of joint effort, a nomenclator for Amanita is still elusive (nearly 500
remaining open questions by my last count).  At the very least, we should
all support lists of names, lists of authors, etc.

Very best,

Rod




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