Re: Paleontologic nomenclature

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Oh man you aren't even scratching the surface with that comment.  We
try to avoid using fossil names alltogether when we talk to non
paleontologists.  However that isn't the worst thing.  How about the
problem of species concept?  For example I know that what I call
Discoaster berggrenii is not the same thing as Art Watterman calls D.
berggrenii which is not what Steve Root calls D. berggrenii.  Then even
worse someone decides to just call his or her concept of D. berggrenii
Discoaster 1 (just to avoid confusion, don't you know?).  Someone else
sees a report with Discoaster 1 (which is meaningless to this person
since no attempt at a description has been made) and just randomly
attaches this term as a time strat marker.  So after this this last
worker sees the extinction of Triquetrorhabdulus rugosus in some other
well.  Well, he or she doesn't want to burden the dim mind of some
geologist with a name like that!  "Let's just call it Discoaster 1" he
or she says (since Discoaster 1 really doesn't mean anything). After
this it becomes a free for all with various workers assigning the words
Discoaster 1 to anything convenient in that part of the section
(including rich breaks in the flora which some worker knows just must
have some marker species if only there was time to really look for it) 
After this the first worker publishes a range chart for the use of
industry workers with Discoaster 1 included.  Some poor guy who wants
to do graphic correlation sees this and says "Oh good! now I can plug
in all these Discoaster 1's from all these reports and get some
meaningful statistics...
And so on and so forth.  Pretty ugly isn't it?  We need to work on this.

Mike

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