Types and Original Authors

[Kevin Tilbrook]

I have been following this thread and have to agree with the views of Dick Petit and Ron Gatrelle - to be confident of your specific assignation one must always try to consult the original publication and its associated material. I want to see that material for myself, not take someone else's word for it (there are a lot of dabblers). Surely this is the basis of taxonomic rigor, otherwise it becomes a case of Chinese Whispers - self perpetuating misidentification. Finding the type material is sometimes hideously timeconsuming and often frustrating, but at the end of the day, when the monograph is written, I can feel confident that I have done MY best, nailed it, and any mistakes are mine, and mine alone! Hopefully, that monograph will stand the test of time and be used for some decades to come. Too often I have seen references to "well-known" and "widely-distributed" species, only to find that after comparing the type material with representative samples from within the supposed
 range of this "well-known" species, low and behold I have a complex of morphologically similar yet easily distinguishable species. On more than one occasion I have differentiated a dozen morphological species from under the original umbrella "species". I love looking at Bryozoa.


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