[Taxacom] Canis [familiaris] dingo Blumenbach - a non-existent name?

[Tony Rees]

Thanks, Francisco, for the further checking. Your suggested explanation
seems very reasonalble and I am confident now that the "Blumenbach, 1780"
attribution in ITIS/CoL is spurious and should read "Meyer, 1793" as per
the relevant ICZN Opinion.

I have also just heard back from ITIS/Smithsonian that they agree that this
correction is necessary and will change it in the live version of ITIS as
soon as is practicable - too late for the 2018 Annual edition of Catalogue
of Life (due out this month) but should make the 2019 edition. Sometimes
things take a while to trickle through the system, but it is at least
hopefully a process of continual improvement.

Maybe to some this will seem a lot of effort to clean up one name but in
this case the error was propagated widely and picked up in other sources
including several Wikipedia articles and Wikispecies, whom I will contact,
as well as elsewhere no doubt. In this era of supposed "fake news" it is
nice to be able to separate fact from fiction by going back to the original
sources.

All the best - Tony



Tony Rees, New South Wales, Australia
https://about.me/TonyRees

On 6 May 2018 at 18:28, Francisco Welter-Schultes <fwelter at gwdg.de> wrote:

> 8th edition from 1807 p. 101
>
> http://resolver.sub.uni-goettingen.de/purl?PPN614778913
>
> 9th edition from 1816 (Wien) p. 80
>
> https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/154789#page/100/mode/1up
>
> 10th edition from 1821 p. 103
>
> https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/155034#page/125/mode/1up
>
> 11th edition from 1825 p. 85
>
> https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/155072#page/103/mode/1up
>
> So the citation you found from McCoy would correspond to the 1821 edition.
> In those times it was usual practice to regard subsequent editions of a
> work as some kind of replacement of earlier editions. So maybe they thought
> that dingo as contained in the most recent edition would have to be
> backdated to the first edition from 1799 or 1780, because it replaced that,
> and compete with that date with Meyer's 1793 name.
>
> Cheers
> Francisco