Re: Paleontologic nomenclature

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On Fri, 23 Dec 94 07:42:06 -0600,
  Mike Styzen  Shelf Expl, 588-4308 writes:

>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

A dire situation, but sloppy practice amongst palynologists can hardly be 
blamed on Linnaean taxonomy.  "A good workman never blames his tools".

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