Re: Mars fossils

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Date
At 06:15 PM 8/18/96 PDT, Andrew MacRae wrote:
>
>[...]
>	The one by Timofeev is particularly, uh, "interesting".  :-)  Five  
>new species are proposed and assigned to terrestrial (!) acritarch genera,  
>and one is assigned to a pre-existing terrestrial acritarch species (!!). 

Well, if the morphology's the same ...    :-)

Taxonomy-by-geography (or by stratigraphy) has been an ugly little thread in
systematics over the years.  I mean, where something is described as new
because it is so far away _it just can't be_ the same taxon as something
that looks like it elsewhere.  If there's a geographic component to a taxon
definition, then of course you can't turn around and do biogeography on the
group without introducing circularity into the argument.

Interplanetary spaces, however, seem to strain the principle.  But maybe we
won't think so in ten years.
  
>No, I am not joking.  I wonder if this means Timofeev's species names have  
>priority over any possible Martian ones?  :-) :-) :-)


 Barry Roth                             barryr@ucmp1.berkeley.edu
 Research Associate, Museum of Paleontology
 University of California, Berkeley, CA 94117 USA   (415) 387-8538