[Taxacom] Plantae (was: New paper on fungal higher classification)

[Tony Rees]

Hi Ken, all,

Kenneth Kinman <kinman at hotmail.com> wrote:

>
>      I also just went to the IUCN website, and couldn't find results for
> either Angiospermae or Magnoliophyta.  Turns out it only gives results for
> Magnoliopsida.  They need to build a better search, so that major synonyms
> are included.
>
> Also: "There is no excuse for a failure to show results for Metazoa "

Well, playing devil's advocate here, whether or not to include search by
major synonyms is a design choice, not automatic; indeed, anyone following
the CoL or comparable systems will *not* automatically have access to
synonyms for other than terminal taxa (species in this case), and even then
will have a choice whether or not to include these in species searches.
Actually I would argue that having a fuzzy search (for misspelled accepted
names as input terms) is at least as useful if not more so, and many
(?most) systems do not provide that either.

On the question of Metazoa versus Animalia at kingdom level, I think folk
would have to be very unobservant to have missed the usage of "Animalia" in
its modern sense (i.e. excluding Protozoa/Protista/Protoctista/Chromista or
whatever) since that has been in plain view since the 5-kingdom system of
life proposed by Whittaker in 1969, and then heavily promoted (with minor
modification) by e.g. Lynn Margulis and co-workers through the 1970s and up
to the present day. In that sense "Animalia" and "Metazoa" are indeed
more-or-less synonymous, but the relative popularity of the former can be
easily demonstrated by a search on (e.g.) Google Scholar which currently
yields 11,200 results for "Kingdom Animalia" in scholarly literature as
against only 347 for "Kingdom Metazoa". So if a synonym search were to be
offered, I would look for other candidates (such as Magnoliophyta) before
worrying about the absence of Metazoa. Just my 2 cents' worth, of course...

Best - Tony