use case: saw [Tadarida pumila] referenced in publication from the 80s, what is the current accepted name?

[jhpoelen]

excerpt from email received by Nancy Simmons June 29, 2023, Liam McGuire

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Taxonomy question for you…or I suppose more about paper trail or other resources. I’ve got a paper from the 80s that refers to Tadarida pumila. I gather the name has changed and I’m trying to track it down. I suspect it went on to be known as Chaerephon pumilus, and now Mops pumilus.

Looking at batnames.org there are no pumila species, but there are several pumilus species and Mops pumilus is the only Molossid on that list. In the species account for M. pumilus there are notes about the history of classification of Mops, Chaerephon, and Tadarida at the genus level. If I go to the Mammalian Species account for C. pumilus, there is a note about C. pumilus being split into four species of Tadarida, including Tadarida pumila.

So I’m feeling pretty good that the T. pumila bat that I’m reading about is now known as M. pumilus. But I’m wondering- is there a more efficient way to go about this sleuthing? Is there a record somewhere that I should be checking? Or is my approach about the right way to go? Taxonomy question for you…or I suppose more about paper trail or other resources. I’ve got a paper from the 80s that refers to Tadarida pumila. I gather the name has changed and I’m trying to track it down. I suspect it went on to be known as Chaerephon pumilus, and now Mops pumilus.

Looking at batnames.org there are no pumila species, but there are several pumilus species and Mops pumilus is the only Molossid on that list. In the species account for M. pumilus there are notes about the history of classification of Mops, Chaerephon, and Tadarida at the genus level. If I go to the Mammalian Species account for C. pumilus, there is a note about C. pumilus being split into four species of Tadarida, including Tadarida pumila.

So I’m feeling pretty good that the T. pumila bat that I’m reading about is now known as M. pumilus. But I’m wondering- is there a more efficient way to go about this sleuthing? Is there a record somewhere that I should be checking? Or is my approach about the right way to go?

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[jhpoelen]

Steps to find the most current name using BTA -

Option A.

1. go to BTA v.
2. search for "Tadarida pumila"
3. review 2 search results

Option B.

1. go to BTA v.
2. search for "pumila"
3. review 2 search results

Option C.

1. go to BTA v.
2. search for " Pumila / Pumilus" (expand genders Pumila / Pumilus)
3. review 2 search results

@ajacsherman

[jhpoelen]

@ajacsherman suggested to add MSW1 and MSW2 to help pull in the Tadarida pumila , and provided examples

needs:

1a. align with BTA - Koopman (MSW2, 1993) (see https://github.com/jhpoelen/msw2 ) 1b. align with BTA - Corbet & Hill checklist of mammals 1991/1992

2. explicitly associate timestamp of the authority / publication related to a specific name published in some corpus. Likely more than one, because various taxonomies include same names.
3. explicitly associate type specimen to a specific name published in some corpus
4. describe what names were synonymized (e.g., isotypic names same type specimen, but moved to different genus) / splits / lumping+merge / new combinations and their provenance <-- creating some kind of language to express, in machine readable way (or not), the relations between names and who made the determination and were these were published.

@n8upham shared - from Plazi--

• Corbet and Hill 1980 (vol 1): https://zenodo.org/record/3873655#.Xtgt_MYpDok
• Corbet and Hill 1991 (vol 3): https://zenodo.org/record/3875153#.Xtgt_8YpDok

scanned and OCR-ed Mammal Species of World vol 1 (Honacki et al. 1982) http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3873244