paleonet ICBN and specific names

[<John.Laurie@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Paleonetters of the botanical persuasion,

 

I am editing a festschrift containing papers on various themes, including palynology. In this I have a minor problem in that an author and a referee disagree on what amounts to an interpretation of the ICBN. I work on fossil invertebrates so the ICBN is all Greek (or Latin?) to me. The impasse is as follows:

 

The author published a couple of plant varieties in 1987, lets call them Exus albus var. thomasi,. E. albus var. richardi. He now believes these to be species separate from E. albus, so therefore wants to raise them to species rank; i.e. Exus thomasi and E. richardi. Under the ICZN such names published in 1987 as varieties would be deemed as infrasubspecific (published after 1960) and not regulated by that code, therefore if they were raised to species rank, they presumably would be new species. This is the interpretation put on this by the referee I mentioned above. However the author gives the impression that he is simply raising something from an essentially subspecific rank to specific rank. Which is it to be?

 

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Dr John R. Laurie

Petroleum and Marine Division 

GEOSCIENCE AUSTRALIA
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