Hi Ray,

thanks for that more than I thought it would be sorry.

Anyway based on that I would say it is a Nomen Nudem because you cannot refer to a figure as a diagnosis. This is the same arguments that Iverson, myself and Georges used to sink most of the turtles descibed in the papers and has been used by Shea and Saddlier as well. So it has precidence when dealing with this paper.

Aplins argument as you put it is wrong, it does not matter how inadequate the desciption is it just has to be there. However it would appear it is not. The only caveat I must put is that I have not seen the Storr paper. W&W are referring to a couple of figures, if the captions of those figures contain any textual written information that diagnoses the taxa then the name is valid. This happened with Elseya purvisi where the caption of the figure that W&W referred to said it had a yellow stripe, yeah thats all it said but its enough.

As a generalisation the type material W&W referred to was failrly accurate so I will assume this has extended to this case so there are no problems there.

Off the top of my head I think the reference in the rules is that it does not meet Article 13 i or ii (a description must meet one or the other to be valid) but check this against Iverson et al., 2001 to be sure if you wish (John Iverson, Earlham College is corrosponding author for reprints). It was published in J. of Herp.

Basically these are saying that a description must (i) contain a description that "purports" to diagnose the taxon or (ii) contain a reference to such a description. Descriptions must be written, not pictures. By purports the rules are meaning that they claim it diagnoses the taxon, does not actually have to work..

So next opportunity declare it a nomen nudem citing the code. Then its finished with.

Cheers, Scott

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