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Date: Sun, 13 Nov 2005 16:21:36 +0100
From: [unknown]
To: PML <phylocode@ouvaxa.cats.ohiou.edu>
Subject: Repost: Proposal about names with prefixes (and suffixes?)
This is another e-mail of mine that has generated very little respons= e,=20 presumably because it was sent at the height of the congress season a= nd=20 because the actual proposal was hidden in a longer post. ----- Original Message ----- =46rom: "David Marjanovic" <david.marjanovic@gmx.at> To: <dinosaur@usc.edu>; <phylocode@ouvaxa.cats.ohiou.edu> Sent: Monday, October 10, 2005 7:35 PM Subject: Re: Stormbergia dangershoeki, new Early Jurassic ornithischi= an from=20 South Africa Recommendation, maybe even Rule: Clade names created by adding a prefix to another clade name should/m= ust be defined in a manner consistent with the meaning of the prefix. Example 1: *Euornithopoda* (author, year) should/must be defined in s= uch a way that it can maximally be a junior heterodefinitional synonym of *Ornithopoda* (author, year), assuming that both names are to be defi= ned. The reason is that eu- means "good, true" in Classical Greek and has historically been used to designate taxa within those described by th= e corresponding prefixless names. Example 2: *Panarthropoda* (author, year) should/must be defined in s= uch a way that it can minimally be a junior heterodefinitional synonym of *Arthropoda* (author, year), assuming that both names are to be defin= ed. The reason is that pan(to)- means "all" in Classical Greek [someone w= ho actually knows Classical Greek should correct this if necessary!] and= has historically been used to designate taxa that include those described= by the corresponding prefixless names. -------------------------------------- As you can see, I can't find a good wording for this... "Maximally" and "minimally" are supposed to mean "if it is as inclusive/exclusive as possible". At least some of the prefixes in question have also been used for other purposes, for example the genus *Euparkeria* was named because = a totally different genus *Parkeria* already existed; their contents ar= e not going to overlap. Probably we should explicitely exclude these cases = =66rom the above proposal, under the assumption that consistency with the= =20 literature outweighs a little confusion. (About the examples: Currently Euornithopoda is used for what botanists would probably call the "core ornithopods", and Panarthropo= da includes everything that was ever referred to Arthropoda, which in cu= rrent usage means Onychophora + Tardigrada + Arthropoda + a load of Cambria= n fossils. By the way... it has _never_ been used for "everything close= r to Arthropoda than to Tardigrada", which is what the so-called Pan- conv= ention would dictate.) We might (!) maybe (!) want to extend this to the suffixes prescribed= by the existing Codes for certain ranks, and/or to some suffixes that ha= ve become fashionable for other purposes, like -iformes and -omorpha. (This, too, would require an exception for some genus names -- zoological superfamilies must end in -oidea, but *Emydoidea* is a val= id genus name that designates the sister-group of *Emys* after which it = is named. Or, again, we might want to outlaw this to eliminate potential confusion -- at the risk of losing some quite popular names.)=20