Richard Fortey - Dry Store Room No. 1 - The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum

Another astonishingly spiny fossil trilobite from the Devonian of Morocco: the spines on this odontopleurid are genuine, but fakes are often offered for sale.

Spiny trilobite, odontopleurid. Photo © Brian Chatterton .

This example is typical of the kind of problems that exercise the judgement of a taxonomist, a mixture of scholarly research and careful observation. The history of naming animals and plants is full of examples where labels have been incorrectly applied. In the nineteenth century communication between scholars was imperfect, so it was then quite likely that an animal or plant might have been named twice by accident. The priority rule often had to be applied. I regret to say that there were also numerous cases where scientists ‘rushed to press’ to establish their priority over any potential rivals. One of the most infamous examples concerning fossils was the race between Professors Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh in the latter half of the nineteenth century to describe and name the spectacular North American dinosaurs then coming to light. This was a case of intellectual war, fought out in publications and in academic disputes. The two protagonists really loathed one another, and each was determined to name any newly discovered animal before his rival. Such enmity certainly stirred up a fever of activity in the prosecution of the war of reputations, but sometimes the casualties were names that got caught in the crossfire. In other examples, it is hard to establish who or what has priority, and the bemused scholar will find himself examining the small print on inside covers to find out whether a given book was published in May or September of 1799. I have used faded library stamps as evidence of the receipt of a publication by the Museum – which must therefore have been published earlier in its country of origin. What is evidently needed is a set of laws to sort out nomenclatural disputes – and so we have the International Code for Zoological Nomenclature, and there is a botanical equivalent. I have to admit that the Code makes for pretty dull reading and can, in the wrong hands, become a pedant’s playground. But it generally works to sort out which name is the valid one. However, there are cases when a rigid application of the Code would result in something silly happening to very familiar names. This might occur, for example, if some bookish scholar discovered a work of unprecedented obscurity containing earlier names for well-known animals. It would be highly undesirable in this case rigidly to apply the rule of priority, for names are a means of communication first and foremost, and nobody wants to revive an old name just for the sake of it. But how can a zoologist decide when to flout the rule of priority? The answer is to apply to the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN) with details of the case in question. With sufficiently good reasons a later name might well be conserved – this is decided by a vote of the Commissioners, who are an international group of taxonomists. Mostly this is just a way of formalizing common sense.

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