Pteridophyta

[Peter Stevens]

At 11:08 AM -0800 3/12/05, Curtis Clark wrote:
>As I pointed out to Tom, the use of Pteridophyta to refer to the fern
>clade predates the wide acceptance of cladistics by botanists, and may
>actually date back to the time when Herb Wagner was the only botanical
>cladist (the fact that he worked with ferns is perhaps suspicious, but
>the change was embraced by many others). The decision to exclude the
>lycophytes from Pteridophyta is not a "cladistic hijacking", it is the
>natural outcome of accomodating new information.


Indeed, it should not be forgotten as we froth merrily about what
names to call things that we have been accumulating data over the
last few years.  Also, I think that when it came to classification
Herb Wagner was not a "strict cladist" - he was more of the
classificatory school of Mayr et al.

Peter S.