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Date: Fri, 05 Dec 2003 23:07:08 +0100
From: David Marjanovic <david.marjanovic@gmx.at>
To: PML <phylocode@ouvaxa.cats.ohiou.edu>
Subject: Re: One more Recommendation?
> I disagree with this idea. To take the > example of Eupelycosauria, I think that we might > want to define that name because there is > currently no synonym. Pelycosauria was never > defined and presumably never will be because it > would refer to the same clade as Synapsida. I agree so far... > Synapsida was preferred (over Pelycosauria) > presumbaly because of the symmetry with > Sauropsida (Synapsida and Sauropsida the two main > clades of amniotes) and because it is less > incomplete than Pelycosauria. This is because > Synapsida included both Pelycosauria and > Therapsida. Regarding the symmetry... Theropsida, which has already been used this way ( = sistergroup of Sauropsida), would have been still preferable over Synapsida. :-) But if Synapsida were given an apomorphy-based definition (as one could argue its name suggests), its known contents would be identical. > So, we probably should never define > Pelycosauria, but that does not mean to me that > we should not define Eupelycosauria. This way, > we could retain some old names that could be > useful to maintain some taxonomic continuity, Hm. See Pelycosauria above -- the continuity of content would be quite small. > provided that part of the meaning of the name is > preserved under PN (in this case, much of the > meaning would remain). Pelycosauria, and by implication Eupelycosauria, has always been assumed to explicitely exclude therapsids & mammals. I think we really should come up with a new name -- there will be less confusion than if we'd suddenly find ourselves being eupelycosaurs. (With the added strangeness of nothing being a pelycosaur.)