Re: Paleontological Nomenclature

[hrlane@xxxxxxxxx]

     
  We do a similar thing at Amoco, but shedding the latin babbling, bug picker 
image of the paleontologist within the industry does not come easily.   

______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________
Subject: Re: Paleontological Nomenclature
Author:  paleonet-owner (paleonet-owner@nhm.ac.uk) at unix,in
Date:    12/29/94 11:16 AM


Rich Lane says:
 >RE:  I suggest that since these scientists do not know Linnean 
  >   nomenclature, don't use it.
  >   
  >   Yes, you and Mr. Holtz would have us further fractionate our 
  >   science by having industry develop its own nomenclature relavant 
  >   to the outside world.  I reject this idea and it requires 
  >   developing another solution to accomodate the inadequacies of the 
  >   Code. Most real recent, practical, value-added advances in the 
  >   science have come out of industry, and you are asking us to do it 
  >   again!?
I have to disagree. there are good ways to communicate things about our 
science without using latin names.  The people we deal with are mostly 
interested in correlations not biology.  In some cases it gets 
downright confusinng.  In the Gulf coast for example some folks will 
call the local extinction of Hyalinia balthica by that name others will 
see the same event and call it Trimosina B (a more or less equivilant 
updip marker).  What we really want to express most of the time is 
horizons of equivilant age regardless of the marker it was picked on. 
Zonations such as the Blow Zones or Martini zones attempt this but they 
are much too coarse for industry purposes.  Million years (heh) would 
be nice to use but there is a new system for that about every other day 
and as we al know hardly anybody references which system they are 
using.  What we do here at Shell is have age horizons assigned a 
alphanumeric designation (with no species or absolute age overtones). 
The geologists are happy we are happy and we keep the latin to 
ourselvs.  See my poster at the upcoming AAPG meeting for a 
demonstration. 
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