Does Darwinius Exist? | The Loom | Discover Magazine
Darwinius has achieved the ultimate triumph of pop-culture consciousness,
having become for the moment the background image on the main Google
search page. But some of the commenters in my post yesterday on the head-
slapping hype around this fossil pointed out something I thought deserving of
its own post: Darwinius may not actually exist.
By this I mean that the name Darwinius may not be valid officially published. I
first became aware of this from Nature editor Henry Gee’s twitterings. The
problem has to do with the fact that the journal where Darwinius was
pubished, PLOS One, is only online.
While these rules may seem a bit esoteric to most people, taxonomists take
them as seriously as a heart attack. I’ll be curious to see how this story
develops. How strange would it be for the most famous fossil of the day to
be rendered nameles
Update #3: I just got a new comment from Peter Binfield, the managing editor of PLOS One
PLoS is aware of the problem with the ICZN not recognizing species names
that are announced in online only journals. The issue specifically relates to us
being online-only (which more and more journals will become in the future)
Update #4: Ugh! Over at Why Evolution Is True, Greg Mayer rightly points
out that Darwinius has been published in paper form already: in the
newspapers that ran stories before the PLOS One paper was published. As
early as May 10, the Daily Mail had a piece. I’m wondering if this has ever
happened before, and have newspapers ended up being cited as the original
publication for other species names?
Update #5: The ICZN Executive Secretary has given me the official word. Read here for the details.
As I posted yesterday, some commenters on the Loom pointed out that,
amidst all the hullaballoo over the unveiling of this primate fossil (oh, don’t
get me started), it looked as if the scientists who wrote the paper failed to
follow the rules for naming a new species. The people who make the rules
(the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature) require paper
copies of a scientific paper, not just a digital one, as was the case of
Darwinius.
Today, the executive secretary of the ICZN used the Loom to confirm that,
yes, Darwinius was not yet Darwinius.