Lappet-faced Vulture (1 Viewer)

Richard Klim

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• May 24, 2012

• #1

The spelling of Torgos tracheliotus is changed to T tracheliotos in IOC World Bird List v3.2 (Draft), citing Rookmaaker 1986.

Comments from our nomenclature gurus...?

 

MJB

Well-known member

• May 24, 2012

• #2

Richard Klim said:

The spelling of Torgos tracheliotus is changed to T tracheliotos in IOC World Bird List v3.2 (Draft), citing Rookmaaker 1986. Comments from our nomenclature gurus...?

Click to expand...

Nowhere near a guru, I note that when the genus was changed from Aegypius (trachielotos) to Torgos in IOC2.3, the species spelling was changed to trachielotus; I seem to remember an explanation that case agreement and the linguistic origins required the -os ending to become -us. Presumably the higher levels of arcane nomenclatural wizardry have since been stirred into wakefulness somewhere this side of Valhalla...
MJB
PS I admit that while responding this time, I was looking at the Watzmann while the strains of Richard Strauss's Alpensinfonie were conjuring up Caspar Friedrich's painting of the German Victorian gentleman on the peak...

 

Richard Klim

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• May 24, 2012

• #3

MJB said:

...I note that when the genus was changed from Aegypius (trachielotos) to Torgos in IOC2.3, the species spelling was changed to trachielotus

Click to expand...

Mike,
Lappet-faced Vulture was reassigned from Aegypius to Torgos in v2.0 (Jan 2009), but the spelling of the specific epithet has remained unchanged as tracheliotus from v1.0 (May 2006) through to v3.1 (Apr 2012).

[Peters 1931, Voous 1977, Mayr & Cottrell 1979, and Dickinson 2003 also use tracheliotus.]

 

Last edited: May 25, 2012

A

aegithalos

Well-known member

• May 24, 2012

• #4

Richard Klim said:

The spelling of Torgos tracheliotus is changed to T tracheliotos in IOC World Bird List v3.2 (Draft), citing Rookmaaker 1986.

Comments from our nomenclature gurus...?

Click to expand...

I don't see any case agreement or linguistic origin issues in this. -us is Latin, usually masculine, -os is the Greek equivalent. Either would be fine for a masculine genus name (such as Aegypius or Torgos). It looks to me as if Rookmaaker simply spotted that the original author's usage (with -os) had been incorrectly transcribed and used subsequently as -us. Peters has the publication date as 1791, whereas Rookmaaker (and Zoonomen) have it as 1796, so the ending may not be the only error that has crept in. I suspect that -os it is, unless someone wants to make a claim of prevailing usage for -us.

Keith

 

mb1848

Well-known member

• May 24, 2012

• #5

The original naming:
http://books.google.com/books?id=K5YLAQAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false .
Page 362.
The letter is definitely an ‘o’ but the top portion is not printed. Making it sort of look like a ‘u’. The lower case ‘u’s look very different from the lower case ‘o’s in this document. The name on the plate is clearly -os. Page 467.

The name was emended to –us as early as 1816. (Wolf Abbildungen naturgeschichte Gegenstände merkw und-Beschreibungen) The –us seems to be the most popular over the years.

This appears to be from 1796.

 

Last edited: May 24, 2012

Richard Klim

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• May 25, 2012

• #6

Thanks, folks.