[Taxacom] Validity of species/subspecies

[Karl Magnacca]

On Thu, 10 Apr 2014 09:59:28, David Campbell wrote:
> As a more complex situation,  I have what seems to be a case where
> an early author decided that a proposed new genus and species
> really belonged in an existing genus and so demoted the genus name
> to a species name, dropping the original species.  Does this
> constitute creating a new species name? Does anyone have examples
> of this to show that it was occasionally practiced?

Not exactly the same, but I came across an example where an author
described a new species of fly while saying that the genus should be
synonymized with another.  This wouldn't normally be an issue,
except that if it had been described in the second genus then the
species name would be a senior homonym of species later described in
the second genus.  A later author came along and concluded that the
later species *was* a homonym based on that statement, even though
the binomial only ever used the first genus, and the two have still
not been lumped (if anything, they're more likely to be kept apart
now).

The result was that the second species had its original name used
for a time, then the replacement accepted uncritically for years. 
The erroneous nature of the fix was only recently discovered and
still hasn't been published.

Karl