[Taxacom] WTaxa ...: PS

[Stephen Thorpe]

well, I'm not sure I care much if an error is "understandable" or not? What I 
care more about is what is going to be done to fix it and others like it. We 
have an image of an endomychid masquerading on EoL as a belid (as an 
oxycorynid, since they haven't yet caught up with the 2005 demotion of 
Oxycorynidae to subfamily of Belidae). My "PS" about this was indicating that it 
wasn't a big issue to me, compared to the wider weevil issues on EoL, etc., but 
I suspect, at least if I hadn't spotted it, this image would have simply sat 
there on that EoL page indefinitely. Is this what we expect from EoL? Are they 
giving us a quality product?? Can they do better? When? ...

the Engonius homonymy apparently predates Pic (see 
http://species.wikimedia.org/wiki/Engonius), though there is no record of the 
Perty name in Nomenclator Zoologicus, and I haven't yet verified its existence, 
but the 2005 renaming of Engonius Gerstaecker is probably sound ...

war! :)

Stephen




________________________________
From: Doug Yanega <dyanega at ucr.edu>
To: TAXACOM at MAILMAN.NHM.KU.EDU
Sent: Sat, 30 July, 2011 12:33:02 PM
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] WTaxa ...: PS

>PS: you might also wanna check this out for a laugh!
>http://www.eol.org/pages/65468

That is the result of the USNM type photo database using the original 
combination, rather than the valid name. That Endomychid *was* 
described as Engonius angustefasciatus by Pic, even though the older 
genus name "Engonius" is an Oxycorynine (the Endomychid name was a 
homonym). Homonyms happen, and are hard for automated systems to 
disambiguate. There is obviously a further problem if an electronic 
resource only links to valid names, and people put other things 
online that do not use the valid names, but this sort of error is 
understandable.

What's "funny" is that the online catalogue of Endomychidae 
(http://insects.tamu.edu/research/collection/hallan/test/Arthropoda/Insects/Coleoptera/Family/Endomychidae.txt)
 
lists that same Pic name under two different genera, with a 
misspelled epithet in one case. That is:

Gerstaeckerus augustefasciatus (Pic, 1940:11) [China]
[=Engonius augustefasciatus Pic, 1940]

appears in one place, and

Sinocymbachus angustefasciatus (Pic, 1940:11) [Szechuan]
[=Engonius angustefasciatus Pic, 1940]

elsewhere. The latter is correct, so one has to wonder about the 
former catalogue record, as to whether it appeared that way in the 
2005 paper which created the genus Gerstaeckerus as a replacement for 
Engonius, or whether Pic actually named two species that differed 
only by one letter on the same page. I sorta doubt the latter.

Peace,
-- 

Doug Yanega        Dept. of Entomology        Entomology Research Museum
Univ. of California, Riverside, CA 92521-0314        skype: dyanega
phone: (951) 827-4315 (standard disclaimer: opinions are mine, not UCR's)
              http://cache.ucr.edu/~heraty/yanega.html
  "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
        is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82

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