Re: Mars fossils

[hrlane@xxxxxxxxx]

     About the only thing we can conclude at this time is, if these objects 
     once lived, they must have been male in gender.
     
     Rich Lane
     hrlane@amoco.com
     


______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________
Subject: Re: Mars fossils
Author:  paleonet (paleonet@ucmp1.Berkeley.EDU) at unix,sh
Date:    8/18/96 10:26 PM


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