It’s been interesting seeing the response to my comment on the ICZN petition to establish Diplodocus carnegii as the replacement type species of the genus Diplodocus . In particular, Mickey Mortimer’s opposition to the petition seems to be based primarily on this argument: I find this unconvincing, on the basis that the ICZN was never designed with dinosaurs in mind in the first place.

If you keep an eye on the wacky world of zoological nomenclature, you’ll know that earlier this year Emanuel Tschopp and Octávio Mateus published a petition to the International Commission on Zoological Nomemclature, asking them to establish Diplodocus carnegii , represented by the ubiquitous and nearly complete skeleton CM 84, as the type species of Diplodocus . That is because Marsh’s (1878) type species, YPM 1920, is a pair

Continuation of this post. I got an answer quite quickly (but after posting the previous post): @larswillighagen @Wikipedia try The Plant List. That's widely accepted: https://t.co/5J0AKPsCzD— R⓪ss Mounce (@rmounce) 20 augustus 2016 The Plant List marks what species are in what genus and family, and groups families in Major Groups, e.g. gymnosperms. It also marks synonyms.

Recently, I tried to find out the exact taxonomy of conifers. I knew that a few years earlier, when I was actively working with it, there were a few issues on Wikipedia concerning the grouping of the main conifer families, namely Araucariaceae, Cephalotaxaceae, Cupressaceae, Pinaceae, Podocarpaceae, Sciadopityaceae, Taxaceae, and actually the grouping of genera in families as well. Guess what changed: not much, not on Wikipedia anyway.

I've been playing with the graph database Neo4J to investigate aspects of the classification of taxa in GBIF's backbone classification. Neo4J is a graph database, and a number of people in biodiversity informatics have been playing with it. Nicky Nicolson at Kew has a nice presentation using graph databases to handle names Building a names backbone, and the Open Tree of Life project use it in their tree machine.

We just released v0.3 of taxize. For details on the update, see the release notes.Some new features New function iplant_resolve() to do name resolution using the iPlant name resolution service.

We just released a new version of taxize - version 0.2.0. This release contains a number of new features, and bug fixes. Here is a run down of some of the changes:First, install and load taxize install.packages("rgbif")library(taxize)New things New functions: class2tree Sometimes you just want to have a visual of the taxonomic relationships among taxa.

Data on more than 10,000 species of ants recorded worldwide are available through from California Academy of Sciences’ AntWeb, a repository that boasts a wealth of natural history data, digital images, and specimen records on ant species from a large community of museum curators.

Natural history museums have long been valuable repositories of data on species diversity. These data have been critical for fostering and shaping the development of fields such as biogeography and systematics.

The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) is a warehouse of species occurrence data - collecting data from a lot of different sources. Our package rgbif allows you to interact with GBIF from R. We interact with GBIF via their Application Programming Interface, or API. Our last version on CRAN (v0.3) interacted with the older version of their API - this version interacts with the new version of their API.