Reinforcing the foundations of ornithological nomenclature: Filling the gaps in Sherborn's and Richmond's historical legacy of bibliographic exploration

Abstract

Due to its public popularity, ornithology has a huge corpus of scientific publication for a relatively small number of species. Although there are global checklists of currently recognised taxa, there has been only limited, mainly individual, effort to build a nomenclatural database that the science of ornithology deserves. This is especially true in relation to concise synonymies. With the arrival of ZooBank and the Biodiversity Heritage Library, the time has come to develop synonymies and to add fuller bibliographic detail to databases. The preparation for both began at the start of the 20(th) century with extensive work by Sherborn and Richmond. I discuss their legacy, offer notes on significant work since then, and provide suggestions for what remains to be done. To make solid the foundations for ornithological nomenclature and taxonomy, especially for synonymies, ornithologists will need to collaborate much more and contribute to the digital infrastructure.

Keywords: ICZN Code; LANs; Ornithology; ZooBank; dates of publication; family-group names; genus-group names; objective synonyms; priority; species-group names; stability; subjective synonyms; synonymy; taxon-sampling; verification.

Figure 1.

Charles Wallace Richmond as depicted in his obituary in The Auk by Stone (1933).

Figure 2.

Bibliographic publications per decade, 1970 to late 2011, by subject. Treating books, periodicals and general works such as catalogues (source: references cited by Dickinson et al. 2011).

Figure 3.

The wrapper for the 13^th part of the Planches Coloriées showing vernacular and scientific names. All the wrappers for the first twenty parts, all that were published without supporting texts, have been depicted in Zoological Bibliography: 10 in vol. 1, No. 4, pp. 144–148 and 10 in Vol. 2, No. 1, 37–41 pp. These pages were published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence and may be reproduced with proper attribution.

Figure 4.

An example of two-state publication. Here the Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London, 1887, demonstrates a two-state situation. Left image: “first state”. Right image: “second state”. Images from Dickinson et al. (2011: 36) reproduced with permission from The Natural History Museum, London.