[Taxacom] Question about labelling types

[Stephen Thorpe]

People obviously fail to understand what is meant by "all other things being equal"! It is clearly not so in the case of molokaiensis.

Stephen

--------------------------------------------
On Mon, 29/2/16, Karl Magnacca <kmagnacca at wesleyan.edu> wrote:

 Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Question about labelling types
 To: taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
 Cc: "Geoffrey Read" <gread at actrix.gen.nz>
 Received: Monday, 29 February, 2016, 5:42 PM
 
 On Sun, 28 Feb 2016 18:41:29,
 Geoffrey Read wrote:
 > Maybe I'm too cynical, but strange things can happen in
 one hundred
 > years of storage in a museum.
 
 Nope, they do indeed.  According to the insect curators
 at the NHM,
 the ones bearing "Holotype" labels among syntype series are
 merely
 those moved to a safe off-site location during WWII. 
 And it is
 relevant even if you could say "all things are equal". 
 E.g., for
 one of the groups I work on, the species "molokaiensis" has
 seven
 specimens representing five species in the syntype series,
 but only
 one is actually from Molokai.  Using one of the others
 as the
 lectotype simply because it has a post-hoc holotype label
 would be
 ridiculous.
 
 Karl
 
 _______________________________________________
 Taxacom Mailing List
 Taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
 http://mailman.nhm.ku.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/taxacom
 The Taxacom Archive back to 1992 may be searched at: http://taxacom.markmail.org
 
 Channeling Intellectual Exuberance for 29 years in 2016.