Taxonomy Discussion Thread

Pepe said:
there are indeed some doubts about these, but that still leaves us with 30+ species and a few others waiting for further investigations to see if they are indeed new species or just local variants. And large parts of the Amazon are still waiting for a taxonomist to be explored. I think that the number of saki monkeys will be (further) reduced, but there are also some variations of woolly and spider monkeys that need to be investigated. So I am expecting some descriptions of new species in the future. Most of the recent new species are not really a result of splitting, but more of new research.
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I still expect based on recent trends in primate taxonomy that with better genetic research we will see more lumps and more species relegated to subspecies status in the future. That said I am more familiar with African/Malagasy species and ungulates when it comes to taxonomy and the diversity of S-American primates can be something of a pandora's box and with quite some of the original literature in spanish/portuguese it isn't very easy sometimes....

For Woolly Monkeys the recent papers that included genetics all argue for lumping instead of splitting, Spider Monkeys I have never looked into...
 
lintworm said:
I still expect based on recent trends in primate taxonomy that with better genetic research we will see more lumps and more species relegated to subspecies status in the future.
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It might also be possible that "rules" about the amount of genetic distance necessary to call a taxon a different genus or species will need to be reviewed. Do all taxa have the same speed of evolution and speciation? The use of subspecies/subgenera/subfamilies is also very disputed, I like it as it helps seeing the relationship between different taxa, but doesn't fit in the Phylogentic Species Concept that is usually used for primates and many other groups.
 
Pepe said:
I like it as it helps seeing the relationship between different taxa, but doesn't fit in the Phylogentic Species Concept that is usually used for primates and many other groups.
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That is why I don't like the PSC, I think subspecies in particular are very helpful in the real world (where it is the species level that counts) to show important variation. I don't think any species concept does a fantastic job and all have obvious limitations. It would be nice if taxonomists also would take a more realistic approach...
 
lintworm said:
That is why I don't like the PSC, I think subspecies in particular are very helpful in the real world (where it is the species level that counts) to show important variation. I don't think any species concept does a fantastic job and all have obvious limitations. It would be nice if taxonomists also would take a more realistic approach...
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PSC being popular is probably partly a political decision. easier to get prtoection (and funds) for an endangered species, than for "just a subspecies".
 
I believe that, when used correctly and from multiple points of evidence (not only genetics and molecular evidence as done with some primates), the PSC is useful for recognizing new taxa. However, at what level should these taxa be recognized is a different question, and I don't think the PSC is very useful in that matter. Hopefully one day more research is done with not only new world monkeys, but also all primates so we can have a more insights in their sistematics and taxonomy
 
Does anyone know what the modern consensus of the validity of the Cyprus White-throated Dipper (Cinclus cinclus olympicus) is? This taxon's Wikipedia page says that it is no longer considered to be a valid taxon, but the page only uses one old reference (from 1955). Meanwhile, the BotW page for the White-throated Dipper treats this subspecies as valid, without comment.
 
So am I a science denier for not being convinced about the species split of oncillas over genetic evidence.
 
Jumping spiders of the genus Hypobleum have been lumped with Maratus, redescribing the two species as Maratus scutalatus and Maratus griseus.
 
I heard some people are splitting Heath Hen now as Cupido cupido. Yes, that means they are putting it into its own monotypic genus, separate from Tympanuchus.
 
birdsandbats said:
I heard some people are splitting Heath Hen now as Cupido cupido. Yes, that means they are putting it into its own monotypic genus, separate from Tympanuchus.
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Not heard about placing them into their own monotypic genus, but I believe there has been more than one study concluding the distinctiveness of the Heath Hen from Greater Prairie Chicken populations.

~Thylo
 
birdsandbats said:
I heard some people are splitting Heath Hen now as Cupido cupido. Yes, that means they are putting it into its own monotypic genus, separate from Tympanuchus.
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Anybody using that combination would be using an invalid name. Due to the rules of nomenclatural priority, if someone decided the Heath Hen should be in its own genus it would keep the name Tympanuchus because it is the type species of the genus. Assuming the prairie chickens and Sharp-tailed grouse stayed in the same genus as one another, they would all have to go into Pedioecetes, which is a younger name that has the Sharp-tailed grouse as its type species. I don't think there's been any published scientific study arguing for this change however.
 
birdsandbats said:
I heard some people are splitting Heath Hen now as Cupido cupido. Yes, that means they are putting it into its own monotypic genus, separate from Tympanuchus.
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Source required!

Apart for what @Gondwana says above, the genus Cupido is already occupied (it is a genus of butterfly).

What I think is happening with your "some people" is that they are saying that the Heath Hen T. cupido cupido is a split from the Greater Prairie Chicken (which would then become T. pinnatus, with the Heath Hen being T. cupido as the originally-named taxa) - but they don't know how scientific names work so they are using the "cupido cupido" bit instead of the actual genus and species.
 
Chlidonias said:
Source required!

Apart for what @Gondwana says above, the genus Cupido is already occupied (it is a genus of butterfly).

What I think is happening with your "some people" is that they are saying that the Heath Hen T. cupido cupido is a split from the Greater Prairie Chicken (which would then become T. pinnatus, with the Heath Hen being T. cupido as the originally-named taxa) - but they don't know how scientific names work so they are using the "cupido cupido" bit instead of the actual genus and species.
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It was from a book on grouse I recently got, Saving the Last Dance.
 
birdsandbats said:
It was from a book on grouse I recently got, Saving the Last Dance.
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I can't find the pages in question, but the book is from 2012 so they wouldn't actually have been splitting the Heath Hen as a full species at that time. I did find reviews which said that some of the text was confusing and that the arrangement of the chapters wasn't taxonomically logical (it goes Heath Hen, Greater Prairie Chicken, Lesser Prairie Chicken, and then Attwater's Prairie Chicken).

So it sounds like there is just some bad editing in it - rather than the author saying that the Heath Hen is a split species called Cupido cupido it seems likely that it is just messy writing.
 
Chlidonias said:
I can't find the pages in question, but the book is from 2012 so they wouldn't actually have been splitting the Heath Hen as a full species at that time. I did find reviews which said that some of the text was confusing and that the arrangement of the chapters wasn't taxonomically logical (it goes Heath Hen, Greater Prairie Chicken, Lesser Prairie Chicken, and then Attwater's Prairie Chicken).

So it sounds like there is just some bad editing in it - rather than the author saying that the Heath Hen is a split species called Cupido cupido it seems likely that it is just messy writing.
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I thought that at first but they specifically say that it is a species separate from Greater Prairie-Chicken several times (in contrast to Atwater’s, which they call a subspecies of Greater).

Oddly the book doesn’t have a publishing date in it so I wasn’t quite sure what year it was from, I had assumed it was newer than that.
 
A new paper out proposes that it is "likely" that there is only one species of Tamandua rather than two (summarising the abstract, they found that there were three haplogroups in the mitogenome of the genus but all three were shared in both currently-recognised species).

The paper is free access, just click on the DOI link to get there. Figure 2 of the paper shows how inter-related the two "species" are based on this study.


Partial text of the abstract: Comparative mitogenome phylogeography of two anteater genera ( Tamandua and Myrmecophaga; Myrmecophagidae, Xenarthra): Evidence of discrepant evolutionary traits - PubMed

Here, we sampled and sequenced the entire mitochondrial genomes (mitogenomes) of two Tamandua species (Tamandua tetradactyla and Tamandua mexicana) (n=74) from Central and South America, as well as Myrmecophaga tridactyla (n=41) from South America. Within Tamandua, we detected three different haplogroups. The oldest (THI) contained many specimens with the T. tetradactyla morphotype (but also several with the T. mexicana morphotype) and originated in southeastern South America (currently Uruguay) before moving towards northern South America, where the THII haplogroup originated. THII primarily contained specimens with the T. mexicana morphotype (but also several with the T. tetradactyla morphotype) and was distributed in Central America, Colombia, and Ecuador. THI and THII yielded a genetic distance of 4%. THII originated in either northern South America or "in situ" in Central America with haplogroup THIII, which consisted of ~50% T. mexicana and 50% T. tetradactyla phenotypes. THIII was mostly located in the same areas as THII, i.e., Central America, Ecuador, and Colombia, though mainly in the latter. The three haplogroups overlapped in Colombia and Ecuador. Thus, T. tetradactyla and T. mexicana were not reciprocally monophyletic. For this reason, we considered that a unique species of Tamandua likely exists, i.e., T. tetradactyla.
 
birdsandbats said:
What do people think of the recent paper that concluded there are 7 species of spotted skunks? I couldn't find the paper.
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IIRC the paper hasn't been released just yet, the article was announcing the findings. I'm waiting to see what their results are as so far they've only confirmed the description of a Yucatan endemic and the splitting of the westernmost populations of Eastern. I'm expecting the Channel Islands population to be split as well.

~Thylo
 
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