tongue in cheek

Mon Sep 19 06:24:05 CDT 2005

On 2005-09-19 05:39, Thomas G. Lammers wrote:
> I named a plant for Bill Clinton a while back: Siphocampylus praevaricator
> Lammers, Novon 12: 230 (2002) ...

As an epithet, it's fine, but as a differentia, it's way too broad to
specify the intended target.

On a similar note, back in the Pleistocene I was a TA for the ecologist
John Wiens at a field station. He was crusty and hard-driven, and
expected no less from the students (our mark-and-recapture, for example,
showed that southern Oklahoma housed an infinite number of
grasshoppers). several of the mammalogy types threatened to discover a
new rodent just for the honor of naming it Peromyscus wiens-anus.

--
Curtis Clark                  http://www.csupomona.edu/~jcclark/
Web Coordinator, Cal Poly Pomona                 +1 909 979 6371
Professor, Biological Sciences                   +1 909 869 4062