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...
All posts tagged with taxonomy
Quote: Colin Groves on primate species
In 2001, the Australian zoologist Colin Groves published an essay in the journal Evolutionary Anthropology giving his perspective on classification in primat...
McKenna and Bell on ranked categories
I learned mammalian systematics and cladistics around the same time that Malcolm McKenna and Susan Bell published their 1997 book, Classification of Mammals:...
Apes and monkeys in etymology
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...
Australopithecus prometheus: is it real?
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 ...
Hybrid origins of the straight-tusked elephants
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...
Are these moustached monkeys a species unto themselves?
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...
Dinosaur phylogeny woes
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...
Arguing about species: Is it evidence, or ego?
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...
Genomes of straight-tusked elephants
Earlier this month in eLife, Matthias Meyer and colleagues published a cool paper: “Palaeogenomes of Eurasian straight-tusked elephants challenge the current...
Quote: W. W. Howells on naming Homo erectus
W. W. Howells, in the conclusion of the 1980 review, “Homo erectus–Who, When and Where: A Survey”:
Quote: Mayr and Neanderthals
Ernst Mayr (1951):
Some thoughts on Dorothy Garrod and celebrity fossils
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...
Too many dinosaurs
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...
Quote: Johanson on the thread of ancestry of Homo
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...
Quote: Johanson and Edey on why Lucy was not the holotype of Au. afarensis
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...
Link: Barbara King reviews Jon Marks
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...
Quote: Dobzhansky on the taxonomic abuse of hominin systematists
This is a footnote in Theodosius Dobzhansky’s notable 1944 paper, “On species and races of living and fossil man”:
‘My sense is that handy man should belong to its own genus, neither australopith nor human’
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 ...
What do we know about early hominin relationships?
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...
Popularity of hominin species names
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. ...
Have Sahelanthropus and Orrorin been written out of existence?
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 on the definition of our genus
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...
How to use scientific names
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...
Quote: Johanson and White on comparing samples
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...
Humans aren't monkeys. We aren't apes, either.
I don’t know why so many people who accept and promote evolution have such a dim view of phylogenetic systematics.
Mailbag: The hominins of our discontent
Re: “Taxonomy on tap”, where I reminded readers about my lack of a principled reason to continue using “hominid” instead of “hominin”.
Taxonomy on tap
Annalee Newitz, in io9: “The last time we redefined what it means to be human”:
Taxonomy through art
Within paleoanthropology, we often witness taxonomic clashes. Species that were named on the basis of a single fossil are later discarded. Now with genomics,...
Primate classification and phylogeny
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...
A problem of fuzzy mammoths
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...
Split lumps
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 ...
"The monkeys shall do bugger all."
Martin Robbins goes ape:
Is the Biological Species Concept a "minority view"?
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...
Mailbag: Chinese subspecies and Denisovans
Re: Denisova:
Iguanodoubt
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...
The failures of dinosaur splitters
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...
An ape by any other name
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...
Sink Australopithecus!
Dennis Etler has been going great guns on his blog, Sinanthropus.
Getting the mojo
Man, I wish I’d have thought of this:
Quote: Higher-level taxa
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...
Mailbag: What is human?
Regarding Gesher Benot Ya’aqov:
Woronso-Mille: A ladder not a bush
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...
This year's gift: The vanity taxon
Scientific American reports on a taxonomic auction by Purdue University:
Forced by a pterosaur
I can’t get over the subhead of this story about a new car-sized pterosaur:
PhyloCode and human evolution
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 ...
Species concepts
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 ...