Showing posts with label taxonomy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label taxonomy. Show all posts
Saturday, October 19, 2019

Arguments for paraphyletic taxa, part 543,997 or so

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Although having largely moved on from blogging, I found myself writing another post on the most frequent topic of this blog, arguments for t...
Saturday, May 12, 2018

What are monotypic genera good for?

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There are a lot of monotypic genera around. In the group I am currently working on the most, the daisy family Asteraceae in Australia, there...
Saturday, September 2, 2017

Having fun with biodiversity databases

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If you have ever professionally used a biodiversity database you will soon have noticed that we still have a long way to go before they are ...
Sunday, April 2, 2017

The taxonomic impediment as illustrated by journals' criteria for the acceptance of manuscripts

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About two weeks ago I learned from a co-author, who in that case is the corresponding author, that a certain systematic botany journal would...
Friday, January 6, 2017

Ochlospecies

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Happy new year, everybody! Although many people are variously fed up with 2016 for the supposedly high number of celebrity deaths, Brexit an...
Saturday, June 18, 2016

Taxonomic terminology again

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I have often complained about idiotically unusable identification keys. Unclear descriptions of species are a related issue. Yesterday ...
Thursday, April 21, 2016

The joys of single-character taxonomy

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Time for a little rant. Two days ago I tried to identify an Australian native Asteraceae. I already knew that it had to belong to one of ...
Saturday, March 26, 2016

Discordant paraphylies executed

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Strangely, editors of systematics journals do not appear to tire of opinion pieces rehashing the discussion about paraphyletic taxa that had...
Saturday, March 12, 2016

Unnecessarily arcane botanical terminology

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Sometimes the personal libraries of retired colleagues who want to downsize, or other left-over old books, are made presented in the corrido...
Thursday, February 11, 2016

Patrocladistics 2: What if we include ancestors?

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Last post we looked at what patrocladistics is and how it works. The example case was not a real group of organisms but contrived, but it w...
21 comments:
Tuesday, February 9, 2016

Patrocladistics 1: How does it work? And a contrived example

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As the approach is often mentioned in pro-paraphyly publications as an objective method of delimiting paraphyletic taxa, I thought I should ...
6 comments:
Sunday, November 22, 2015

Do half the natural history specimens in the world really have the wrong name?

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On Friday a colleague drew everybody's attention to a recently published study from Edinburgh and Oxford: Goodwin et al. 2015 , Widespre...
Sunday, August 23, 2015

Andere Laender, andere Sitten

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One thing that gave me a bit of a culture shock after coming to Australia was the way in which plant taxonomists work here compared to how I...
Sunday, May 10, 2015

A new classification of all living organisms

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Of course, the day after I write that there is a near-unanimous consensus that taxa should be monophyletic, I get an alert that a new classi...
2 comments:
Thursday, April 23, 2015

Giving taxonomists recognition through citations

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Today we discussed the recent Zootaxa paper Fried spicy Linnaeus (Kottelat, 2015) in our journal club. It is open access and a fun read, we...
Friday, October 24, 2014

Taxonomy is more important to hunter-gatherers than to farmers

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Over the past few days we had a big strategy meeting across the Australian national biological collections: land plants, tree seeds, algae, ...
Thursday, February 13, 2014

Identification keys: taxonomist-friendly versus user-friendly

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An important part of my work are identification keys. Although multi-entry online keys are increasingly becoming available, the standard for...
2 comments: