Megapnosaurus?

Spudley writes: "I was tempted to put this under the humor topic, but I guess it's best here in science. An entertaining article in USA Today tells of how a beetle expert arbitrarily changed the scientific name of a dinosaur from "Syntarsus" (Latin: "fused ankle") to "Megapnosaurus" (Latin: "big dead lizard"). Dinosaur experts are (understandably) kicking up quite a fuss about it."

Comments

maybe more appropriate?

[Anonymous Coward]

Since the Mega- prefix was deemed inappropriate, due to the dinosaur's relatively small 4.5 feet heighth, maybe micrapnosaurus would be better suited.

Add -osaur

[guiding_knight]

I find this quite entertaining, and disturbing at the same time. Does this mean if I find a mistake in someones name chosen for a creature, I can rename some dinosaur yourmamasaur? :)

Honestly, I think the best, most scientifically reliable and polit thing to do would be to just add a suffix. Call it syntarsaur or syntarsusaurus, something along those lines. This probably does not follow any sort of species naming convention, but I'm sure a reasonable substitute could be found by adding something to the end (in latin, of course:). This would avoid a lot of inter-field animosity. Instead they chose to set a precedent of mocking other fields of science. This does not bode well for the effort to catalog all species. We could end up with some very odd names indeed.

I thought scientific names...

[V. Mole]

...included family/genus/species as well (e.g. homo habilus vs homo sapien), so how can a beetle name conflict with a dinosaur name? And if they do conflict, why is there an "elephant beetle"?