[Taxacom] loooongest species description?

[Frederick W. Schueler]

On 2/24/2011 11:55 AM, Robin Leech wrote:

> Try ants.  Will send you something of interest.

* that reminds me of Bill Brown once commenting on descriptions of Ants 
that included "eyes black, legs six" which are characters of higher taxa 
rather than of the species. A quality check on these long descriptions 
would be the proportion of the characters which are invariable in a 
higher taxon of which it is a member.

fred.
=============================================
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Andy Deans"<andy_deans at ncsu.edu>
> To:<taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu>
> Sent: Thursday, February 24, 2011 9:14 AM
> Subject: [Taxacom] loooongest species description?
>
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> What are your candidates for the longest species description? I'm
>> especially interested in descriptions that have the highest number of
>> *anatomical attributes* described, as opposed to behavioral, ecological,
>> or other characters. Any thoughts?
>>
>> My quick and dirty examination of recent Hymenoptera descriptions yields
>> an average of 42 or so morphological characters per description. For the
>> purposes of this exercise I am lumping the diagnosis and description
>> together. Anyone know of a description that is hundreds of characters long
>> and takes up dozens of pages?
>>
>> It'd would be fun to see it!
>> Just curious,
>> Andy
>>
>> Andrew R. Deans
>> Department of Entomology
>> North Carolina State University
>> Campus Box 7613
>> 2301 Gardner Hall
>> Raleigh, NC USA 27695-7613
>>
>> phone: +1 (919) 515-2833
>> fax: +1 (919) 515-7746
>> skype: ardeans
>> http://deanslab.org/
>>
>>
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>
>
>
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> The Taxacom archive going back to 1992 may be searched with either of these methods:
>
> (1) http://taxacom.markmail.org
>
> Or (2) a Google search specified as:  site:mailman.nhm.ku.edu/pipermail/taxacom  your search terms here
>


-- 

fred schueler
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          Frederick W. Schueler & Aleta Karstad
Bishops Mills Natural History Centre - http://pinicola.ca/bmnhc.htm
now in the field on the Thirty Years Later Expedition -
http://fragileinheritance.org/projects/thirty/thirtyintro.htm
Daily Paintings - http://karstaddailypaintings.blogspot.com/
     RR#2 Bishops Mills, Ontario, Canada K0G 1T0
   on the Smiths Falls Limestone Plain 44* 52'N 75* 42'W
    (613)258-3107 <bckcdb at istar.ca> http://pinicola.ca/
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