Wary, too, of advocating a tyranny of the nominal – a taxonomic need to point and name, with the intent of citing and owning – when in fact I perceive no opposition between precision and mystery, or between naming and not knowing.
When in 1758 Carl Linnaeus began the formal taxonomic classification still in use today, he recognised about 20,000 species.
If they had endorsed her petition it would have endorsed her taxonomic view".Another problem is that the ICZN is supposed to rule on things that have been published, and this has not yet.
It is a sad statement about the scientific method and peer-review process if it is.Anthony B. Rylands Rockville, MarylandSIR —Your excellent leader is right to warn against taxonomic inflation.
(A family is the taxonomic classification level above a genus, and it is used by palaeontologists interested in extinction rates because the randomness of preservation makes it hard to know when, exactly, a species or a genus really has vanished from the face of the Earth).
They are aging, and cannot respond quickly to all the calls for their skills; there is limited access to the taxonomic work published so far; identifying and naming organisms can be difficult and time-consuming, and there are too few reference collections and libraries around the world.
Luckily, there is no taxonomic police force, so there is no obligation to abide by any revision to the name of the famous fly.
That does not mean, however, that a zoologist would mistake a 200m-year-old turtle or a 400m-year-old scorpion for any species now alive.What is remarkable about the new find is that it is so similar to modern animals that it can be assigned to an existing genus the lowest level of Linnaean classification above a species rather than just to some higher taxonomic group.
But a suspiciously large number of the new species have turned up in the limited group of big, showy animals known somewhat disparagingly as "charismatic megafauna"—in other words the species that the public, as opposed to the experts, care about.One reason for this taxonomic inflation is that the idea of a species becoming extinct is easy to grasp, and thus easy to make laws about.
It is actually a frog, but so different from other frogs that it has its own taxonomic family; and because its closest relatives are in the Seychelles, the discovery had implications for theories of palaeogeography and species migration in prehistory.
Species of Sulawesi macaques were elevated from subspecies to species not through taxonomic sleight of hand, but rather through painstaking examination of novel material.
