Thursday, May 28, 2009

Panphagia & Aerosteon live!


An update to the previous concerns over the validity of the name Panphagia (see original post on the new species here, and the ICZN controversy here). In the comments section of the later post, an author of the Panphagia description in the online journal PLoS ONE, had this to say:

  • "Regarding to the ICZN requierements, I let you know that PLoS made the printed copies. So, the problem of the validity or not of the new species is over."
    --Ricardo Martínez, Panphagia paper author
So there you have it, PLoS ONE, after the Darwinius debacle, is probably going back to correct any past oversights in this area. The name Panphagia protos Martínez & Alcober 2009 is officially valid and doesn't need to be emended (just note the change in exact publication date, in case some claim-jumper has published another name or alternate spelling or something in the mean time). EDIT: Aerosteon and Maiacetus have been similarly addressed. The official publication date for Aerosteon is now 2009 as far as the ICZN is concerned.

[Illustration Panphagia above is from here, copyright Jorge Gonzalez.]

5 comments:

  1. Yes, they have all been addressed the same way - all the taxonomy papers in PLoS ONE now describe valid taxonomic names. Thanks.

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  2. This is all post-Darwinius though, correct? So the valid publication date for Aerosteon is now 2009, rather than 2008?

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  3. >So the valid publication date for Aerosteon is now 2009, rather than 2008?<

    According to the ICZN, yes.

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  4. Correct for all except the paper describing new ant species (our very first taxonomy paper) which was resolved at the time of publication by depositing CDs to libraries.

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  5. Thank goodness! I was just waiting for some yahoo to rename the things in an obscure journal. . .

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