“You Keep Using That Word”

Behold another rant on nomenclature, posted on the Dinosaur Mailing List recently. I am slightly modifying it for consumption here.

Something Is Wrong Here

Eugene Gaffney, turtle expert from the American Museum of Natural History & David Krause, mammal expert from the Department of Anatomical Sciences at Stony Brook University, both in New York State, US, have recently described  a new fossil pelomedusoid turtle from the Maastrictian Maeverano Formation of Madagascar. This isn’t ordinarily news, and certainly not for Gaffney, who trots the globe describing new turtles, but something in the paper, not quite based on the skull, caught my eye:

Whether Clades Should Have No Name

I am posting this here because I don’t want to log down Darren’s blog with my comment, where he has posted his perspective on the new paper, so it’s going here.

Valentine Fischer, Michael Maisch, and a host of other authors have a new paper out in PLoS ONE dealing with the perennial issue of ichthyosaur taxonomy. There, they erect a new taxon Acamptonectes densus for an ophthalmosaurine ophthalmosaurid located in the Early Cretaceous, defying previous regards that ophthalmosaurids didn’t survive the end of the Jurassic. It is derived on a combination of features which are otherwise not held by an array of other taxa, including numerous autapomorphies; the morphology at hand is so distinctive that additional specimens from across Europe have been referred to the Acamptonectes umbrella, or to the type species, including a paratype from Germany, where the holotype derives from England. Darren Naish, one of the coauthors, has his own write-up at TetZoo.

“Taste” Versus “Science”

My recent discussion on the value of “originalism” has led to some interesting comments from respondents Mickey Mortimer and Mike Taylor. As I respect both of them, but disagree, I will post their comments in full below and respond to them in more detail rather than in comments. This gives me an excuse for yet another non-tooth-related post.

A Radical Idea

Or … maybe not so radical. It doesn’t change that much.

Some readers here will recall a small debate over at SV-POW! where I argued with Mike Taylor over the effective purpose and reason behind the recognition of the name Giraffatitan [1] (originally named as a subgenus of Brachiosaurus by Greg Paul [2]). In this work, Mike Taylor described the known material of Brachiosaurus altithorax (as recognized by Riggs [3]), and noted the distinctive qualities between Brachiosaurus altithorax and then-Brachiosaurus brancai, the latter a sauropod taxon recovered from the latest Jurassic of Tendaguru, Tanzania [4].

The Linnaean System vs Anything Else

As may be apparent by now, my primary interests are in the function and evolution in teeth … and precision in terminology. The latter is rather imprecise, as it is a feature of something greater: Precision in methodology. This includes nomenclature, so that i can say that if I see something, I have a name for it that is likely to be what someone else who — having never read anything I’ve written — will call it.

For the most part, systematic taxonomy gives scientists a die-hard process and reference to the nomenclature of organisms. There will always be different lay terms for things, especially as there continues to be different languages, but when it comes to scientific nomenclature, there should only be one thing. This allows me to talk about something like Oviraptor philoceratops, and not expect someone to pull up a discussion on “Ingenia” yanshini instead, or something else.