200 years after the first scientific description of a dinosaur, called Megalosaurus, an international group of paleontologists is calling for a review of the guidelines for choosing the names to give to new species, in order to make them more scientifically rigorous, inclusive and representative of the place and of how fossils are discovered.
The Nature magazine website reports it.
To understand how the naming of dinosaurs has changed in the last two centuries, the team of paleobiologist Emma Dunne of the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (Germany) examined all the names (about 1,500) that have been assigned to the dinosaurs of Mesozoic era (ranging from 251.9 million to 66 million years ago).
About three names out of a hundred were problematic because they were inspired by controversial figures or because they reflect a sexist, racist or neocolonial culture.
“The problem in numerical terms is really insignificant, but it is significant in terms of importance,” says one of the study's authors, paleontologist Evangelos Vlachos of the Egidio Feruglio Museum in Trelew, Argentina.
“We are not saying that from tomorrow we need to change everything - specifies the scholar - but we must critically review what we have done, understand what we have done well and what we have not done well, and try to correct it in the future”.
A proposal to avoid perpetuating old stereotypes is to choose names that refer to the physical characteristics of the animal, in order to also facilitate communication with the public.
At the moment the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (Iczn) is against the idea of retroactively modifying the names of species and does not seem willing to ban names dedicated to characters (eponyms), while it is considering the possibility of introducing systems of different names.
"Regulation is certainly desirable, if we consider that in recent years, unthinkable names such as those dedicated to multinational companies have been coined", comments Cristiano Dal Sasso, paleontologist at the Natural History Museum of Milan.
"It would be more appropriate to link the names primarily to the locations where the fossils were discovered and to the distinctive anatomical characteristics of the species, perhaps also making reference to the language and culture of the local populations, which are too often forgotten."
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