Taxacom: "Early Permian" angiosperms... real or not real taxa/names?

[Kustatscher Evelyn]

Hi Tony,
I'm terribly sorry for this, but I was not able to check the mails earlier. And as said, not use his "papers" at all.
Evelyn

Von: Tony Rees <tonyrees49 at gmail.com>
Gesendet: Dienstag, 7. Juni 2022 09:01
An: Kustatscher Evelyn <Evelyn.Kustatscher at naturmuseum.it>
Cc: John Grehan <calabar.john at gmail.com>; taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
Betreff: Re: Taxacom: "Early Permian" angiosperms... real or not real taxa/names?

Aha... Thanks very much, Evelyn for that useful background! In that case I shall delete his names and the cited work in which they were published from my data system... In fact they stay on the system as deprecated records where persons with admin privileges will see them as deleted, with a note explaining why, which will avoid them being accidentally created again as duplicate entries.

A day or two spent and/or wasted, perhaps, in pursuit of this, however some useful information has come to light along the way as well, so I do not really mind!

With best regards - Tony

Tony Rees, New South Wales, Australia
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On Tue, 7 Jun 2022 at 16:12, Kustatscher Evelyn via Taxacom <taxacom at lists.ku.edu<mailto:taxacom at lists.ku.edu>> wrote:
Sorry to have seen this mail only now but I was off on holidays.

Apart from the general discussion I can cut the discussion on the paper pretty short: the "paper" that Michael Wachtler put on research gate and/or his private homepage are pdfs written, layout and created by him. The "journal" Dolomythos does formally not exist, it is just his creation, the ISSN number is fiction, never deposited in the main institutions as requested by the Italian lay. The pdfs he creates and put online exist in several versions (depending when you download it) not numbered as such where he changes continuously the names and some formally relevant information on localities, holotypes, way of writing of the names and thus are illegitimate considering the code. He prints later the pdfs also as "books" and sells them, remodifying again the "papers" and changing some scientifically and formally relevant parts as well. Thus, from a formal point of view these "papers" do not exist. We had an inquiry on that to the commission of the code.

Moreover there have been several legal pursuits against this man since the material has been collected without the relevant permits, some of his "holotypes" are partly colored and redrawn specimens and/or even composed of originally different pieces of plant remains (you can see that when you see the originals). He was convicted by the Italian law due to several reasons (including illegal detention of material and manipulation of scientifically putatively important material). To close a very long story short. Everything that has the name of this man on and is pre-2010 and not published in generally well-established papers is a fraud and has not to be considered. Why pre-2010, because up to that year when the legal action started against him, he requested to be mentioned as co-author of the papers of material he had collected in order to give it into official deposits as requested by the Italian law and the Code.

Last but not least: Michael Wachtler is a self-made collector, museum-"director", philosopher of life, author of books, films etc, if somebody wants so have a look at is homepage. He has no background studies (not that a degree is necessary to do good science but sometimes helpful). The paper ae not cited by anybody then himself since they do formally not exist according to the code and cannot even be cited.

If anybody is in need of more information, he can contact me directly on my mail-address. I was, unfortunately, involved in all of this in the last 25 years and are the official representative paleontologist for the ministry and the SPI (Italian paleontological society) of the region of Italy.

With kind regards,
Evelyn Kustatscher