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The Philosophy of Palaeontology Blog
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What’s in a name? What should be?

February 29, 2024

Nature recently ran an interesting piece on the absence of rigorous guidelines for naming dinosaur species. It seems to have been prompted by unpublished work by Emma Dunne and colleagues, which tries to quantify the volume of “problematic” dinosaur names in the literature. (Here “problematic” should be taken in the political sense, as indicating the presence of racist, sexist, or [neo-] colonial connotations) Dunne and colleagues found that about 3% of the names tick this box: not a large number, but not a negligible one either. In a database of ~1500 entries, it comes to about 45 names. Anyway, the ICZN is unlikely to act on this information for reasons having to do with taxonomic stability. It seems that other options are on the table, however, like a peer review process for new names in the literature.

For some related content, check out Jan Forsman’s piece on the first named dinosaur, Megalosaurus:

The Weird Early History of PaleontoloGY: ROBERT PLOT And Scrotum humanum


And also my essay on paleontology and colonialism:

Lords of Marble and the Spear

In Max Dresow
← No Anthropocene, no problemPhilosophy of the Paleosciences Workshop at Egenis (Exeter) →

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