New answers tagged taxonomy
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There was a taxonomic revolution brought about by cladistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cladistics. Willi Hennig wrote about it in 1950, but he was an East German, and his work did not gain traction in the West until it was translated into English in the late 1960s. Then it took a while to become consensus. Since then, all taxonomy is based on ...
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This will vary from discipline to discipline. In paleontology valid species means a population that can be show to be morphologically distinctive in a way that cannot be better explained as sexual dimorphism or a growth distribution. In a living species it may rely on genetic (breeding) isolation.
Basically a "valid" species is meant to show it as distinct ...
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"Valid" in this case is just emphasizing that the Heterotermes perfidus on this island are a different (real) species, and not just a variation of their closest relatives. You need not get bogged down with how we determine species, or define species. It just means that this taxon (named group) exists as a separate species: a "valid" species, based on ...
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