Photography-based taxonomy is inadequate, unnecessary, and potentially harmful for biological sciences

The question whether taxonomic descriptions naming new animal species without type specimen(s) deposited in collections should be accepted for publication by scientific journals and allowed by the Code has already been discussed in Zootaxa (Dubois & Nemésio 2007; Donegan 2008, 2009; Nemésio 2009a–b; Dubois 2009; Gentile & Snell 2009; Minelli 2009; Cianferoni & Bartolozzi 2016; Amorim et al. 2016). This question was again raised in a letter supported by 35 signatories published in the journal Nature (Pape et al. 2016) on 15 September 2016. On 25 September 2016, the following rebuttal (strictly limited to 300 words as per the editorial rules of Nature) was submitted to Nature, which on 18 October 2016 refused to publish it. As we think this problem is a very important one for zoological taxonomy, this text is published here exactly as submitted to Nature, followed by the list of the 493 taxonomists and collection-based researchers who signed it in the short time span from 20 September to 6 October 2016

La remontée du Mékong de Vientiane à Luang Prabang en 1947

Avant-propos : un homme tranquille De très ancienne souche normande, Jean Deuve est né le 6 mars 1918 à Granville (Manche), où il réside actuellement. Il a non seulement joué un rôle notable dans les événements complexes qui ont agité le Laos et l’Indo-Chine en général dans la période d’après-guerre, mais a également beaucoup contribué à leur compréhension historique, culturelle et politique. Il constitue en effet un cas rare, celui d’un historien qui a participé à l’histoire. Outre de nombre..

Case 3291. Dromiidae Bonelli, 1810 (Insecta, Coleoptera, Caraboidea): Proposed Emendment Of Spelling To Dromiusidae To Remove Homonymy With Dromiidae De Haan, 1833 (Crustacea, Decapoda, Brachyura, Dromiacea)

Volume: 61Start Page: 225End Page: 23

Molecular systematics and evolutionary history of the genus Carabus (Col. Carabidae)

International audienc

Empirical assessment of RAD sequencing for interspecific phylogeny

International audienceNext-generation sequencing opened up new possibilities in phylogenetics; however, choosing an appropriate method of sample preparation remains challenging. Here, we demonstrate that restriction-site-associated DNA sequencing (RAD-seq) generates useful data for phylogenomics. Analysis of our RAD library using current bioinformatic and phylogenetic tools produced 400x more sites than our Sanger approach (2,262,825 nt/species), fully resolving relationships between 18 species of ground beetles (divergences up to 17 My). This suggests that RAD-seq is promising to infer phylogeny of eukaryotic species, though potential biases need to be evaluated and new methodologies developed to take full advantage of such data