THE POWER OF NAMES: NOMENCLATURE IN PALEONTOLOGY AND BIOSTRATIGRAPHY

As scientists, we all agree that the quality of our inferences relies on the quality of the data that goes in to them. Most information on the past and current living world is linked through the scientific names of organisms, so they are the key for information access about anything published or catalogued on biodiversity.

The International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN) is adviser and arbiter for the zoological community by generating and disseminating information on the correct use of scientific names. The ICZN is responsible for producing the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature - a set of rules for the naming of animals, and for the resolution of nomenclatural problems for both Recent and fossil taxa, permitting continuity of information retrieval through the history of life.

By providing a kind of ‘high court’ and quasi-legal structure for problems in nomenclature, the ICZN is both the foundation for communication about this complicated body of information and an infrastructure for scientific information exchange. Animals make up the largest part of described biodiversity, with approximately 1.8 million living and 300,000 fossil species currently recognized, with about 2-4x more available names than recognised taxa.

Correct and precise understanding of biological names is not confined to esoteric academia. In industry, for example, the identification of the fossil Korystocysta gochtii in a Jurassic North Sea sequence enabled the location of millions of barrels of oil in an unexpected down-faulted reservoir that would otherwise have remained undrilled and unexploited. Development wells are biosteered according to the identity of the fossil fauna in, above and below productive seams.

The ICZN has just launched its official updated registration site, ZooBank, for new publications and names: http://zoobank.org/ to provide an on-line definitive database for all zoological generic and species names - extinct and living. Continued development of the ICZN’s authoritative names server and input from the user community will dramatically improve information access and ultimately the quality of research that relies on stable scientific names of animals.