Taxacom: Abbreviations in species descriptions

[Scott Thomson]

Most reptile ones are highly standardized. In turtles they have a series of
them also. They were described in full in their original usage. Some turtle
ones were originally developed by me, decades ago, I defined them back
then. I have seen a number of recent papers using mine or several other
people's works who do not redefine them, they also do not cite where they
got them.

Lack of these citations mat make them hard to identify what was actually
measured.

Cheers Scott

On Wed, May 25, 2022, 6:17 PM lynn via Taxacom <taxacom at lists.ku.edu> wrote:

> Peter,
> Surely the full description of the character should be given on first
> usage and then the abbreviation indicated is used subsequently. This should
> avoid any confusion. Peters “Dictionary of Herpetology” seems to be the
> standard reference for herpetological terms but doesn’t seem to include any
> of the abbreviations you mention.
> Lynn
>
> > On 25 May 2022, at 23:32, Peter Uetz via Taxacom <taxacom at lists.ku.edu>
> wrote:
> >
> > 
> > A lot of recent species descriptions, at least in reptiles, use a
> variety of abbreviations.
> > I wonder how common that is in other taxonomic groups, and more
> importantly, if there are any (published) standards for such abbreviations.
> >
> > For instance, in reptiles, common abbreviations include SVL (for
> snout-vent length) but there seems only limited agreement on others,
> > e.g. for snout length people have used SL or SnL, or more precisely
> eye-to-snout-distance (ESD) = snout-to-eye-distance (SE), etc.
> > Of course, SL can actually can also mean other things, such as
> supralabial scale (count) etc.
> >
> > Thanks!
> >
> >
> > ————————————————————————————————————
> > Peter Uetz
> > Center for Biological Data Science
> > Virginia Commonwealth University
> > Richmond, VA 23284
> > USA
> >
> > Reptile Database (
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