Quote: Eileen Whitehead Erlanson defining taxonomic inflation
I was reading today to find the origin of the term “taxonomic inflation”. This is a common idea today from people who criticize an overzealous attention to d...
I was reading today to find the origin of the term “taxonomic inflation”. This is a common idea today from people who criticize an overzealous attention to d...
In 2001, the Australian zoologist Colin Groves published an essay in the journal Evolutionary Anthropology giving his perspective on classification in primat...
I learned mammalian systematics and cladistics around the same time that Malcolm McKenna and Susan Bell published their 1997 book, Classification of Mammals:...
In scientific English, today we often distinguish between “monkeys” and “apes” in a meaningful way. Apes are the tail-less primates of the Old World that are...
Lee Berger and I have a new article out in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology that looks at what may be the biggest issue in hominin taxonomy for ...
Elephants are one of the most important comparisons for human origins. Like humans, they’re long-lived animals that have complex social behavior, they requir...
I ran across a news article from the BBC by Paul Rincon, about a proposed taxonomic revision to patas monkeys in northeastern Africa: “Moustached monkey is s...
This is a nice write-up by Laura Geggel of a current exchange of comments in Nature about dinosaur phylogeny: “Dino Family Tree Overturned? Not Quite, But Ch...
For some people who follow human evolution news, recognizing “species” is really just about whether you’re a lumper or a splitter. Many people assume that th...
Earlier this month in eLife, Matthias Meyer and colleagues published a cool paper: “Palaeogenomes of Eurasian straight-tusked elephants challenge the current...
W. W. Howells, in the conclusion of the 1980 review, “Homo erectus–Who, When and Where: A Survey”:
Ernst Mayr (1951):
Lydia Pyne’s new book, Seven Skeletons: The Evolution of the World’s Most Famous Human Fossils is a reflection on how fossils become worldwide celebrities. I...
Maggie Koerth-Baker has a very nice piece in FiveThirtyEight about the high proportion of dinosaur genus names that have eventually been discarded over the y...
Again from Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind today, Don Johanson describes his thoughts upon the question of whether to place the Hadar jaw remains (later at...
From Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind by Donald Johanson and Maitland Edey, p. 288, a very good concise description of why Johanson and White did not choose...
Barbara King discusses Jon Marks’ new book, Tales of the Ex-Apes: How We Think about Human Evolution, on her NPR blog: “Are We Ex-Apes? A Story Of Human Evol...
This is a footnote in Theodosius Dobzhansky’s notable 1944 paper, “On species and races of living and fossil man”:
In February, I revisited the 1964 definition of Homo habilis by Louis Leakey, Philip Tobias and John Napier: “Leakey, Tobias and Napier on the definition of ...
Ten years ago I published a paper on the failure of cladistics to resolve questions of early hominin relationships. My study used computer simulation to prod...
I was curious about the use of Homo ergaster over time. It seems to me that fewer and fewer paleoanthropologists have been using it over the last few years. ...
Barbara King devoted a recent NPR blog post to highlighting some professional acrimony in Current Anthropology: “Did Humans Evolve On The Savanna? The Debate...
Leakey, Tobias and Napier (1964) defined the species, Homo habilis. A simple species diagnosis was not enough: Leakey and colleagues had to argue for an expa...
Dave Hone has a short explainer with persnicketyness about the proper use of taxonomic names for species: “What’s in a name? Why scientific names are importa...
Don Johanson and Tim White, writing in their 1979 paper on the phylogeny of early hominins (and introducing Australopithecus afarensis as an ancestor of late...
I don’t know why so many people who accept and promote evolution have such a dim view of phylogenetic systematics.
Re: “Taxonomy on tap”, where I reminded readers about my lack of a principled reason to continue using “hominid” instead of “hominin”.
Annalee Newitz, in io9: “The last time we redefined what it means to be human”:
Within paleoanthropology, we often witness taxonomic clashes. Species that were named on the basis of a single fossil are later discarded. Now with genomics,...
Our relationship to other kinds of primates is in part reflected by the pattern of similarities and differences we share with them. This pattern of similarit...
Paleogenomics is changing the way we study evolution. In a number of cases, it now allows us to study extinct organisms with the same methods as we study liv...
The Friends of Darwin blog notes that the terms “lumpers” and “splitters” in taxonomy go back to Darwin’s time. The example is a letter Darwin received from ...
Martin Robbins goes ape:
Last week, Science ran a couple of items by Ann Gibbons that give further perspective on the discoveries last year that Neandertals and Denisovans both contr...
Re: Denisova:
Darren Naish has written a nice discussion of the taxonomic difficulties of Iguanodon. It’s a guest post at the Scientific American blog. Dinosaurs and homin...
A-HA! We all lecture in our classes about the perils of naming too many species, but now the facts have been statistically proven! Well, at least for dinosau...
As usual, I was looking for something else – this time in the writing of Henry Fairfield Osborn – and came across an interesting paper that he delivered as a...
Dennis Etler has been going great guns on his blog, Sinanthropus.
Man, I wish I’d have thought of this:
I ran across this passage in a book chapter by D. Tab Rasmussen, covering early catarrhine evolution. I think it captures an important point about the fossil...
Regarding Gesher Benot Ya’aqov:
In a new paper, Yohannes Haile-Selassie and colleagues describe new hominin fossils from Woranso-Mille, Ethiopia. A good thing: It gives somebody like me a r...
Scientific American reports on a taxonomic auction by Purdue University:
I can’t get over the subhead of this story about a new car-sized pterosaur:
The April issue of Discover has a feature article on PhyloCode, focusing on the roles of Jacques Gauthier and Kevin de Queiroz in trying to revise the code ...
A new population that results from a speciation event is called a species. But although species result from a simple process, recognizing species in nature ...