`That group of secondarily terrestrial, toepadless species (if it's a clade as the tree shows; I don't know from New World hylids) seems like a good unit to carry the name Pseudacris. No argument from me.



But there's no need for that to render Hyla paraphyletic, or to split Hyla up into a million indistinguishable genera to avoid paraphyly. Just use the CLADE name Pseudacris, and recite after me: all Pseudacris are Hyla, but not all Hyla are Pseudacris.'



Doesn't that just render your nomenclature unnecessarily confusing? WTF do you call triseriata, for instance? Hyla triseriata? Pseudacris triseriata? Hyla Pseudacris triseriata?



`It's called INCLUSION. Descendants never leave their ancestral taxa, they stay connected to the tree at the same point in history where they first budded off. That's why there is never a reason to recognise paraphyletic taxa (apart from species) when the tree is known. Just throw away the rigidity of Linnean rank, and there's no problem....'



OTOH, if you know the tree you don't need the names to reflect phylogeny--you've got the phylogeny right there in front of you.



Patrick Alexander

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