Abstract

Taxonomy in the century of extinctions: taxonomic gap, taxonomic impediment, taxonomic urgency

Highlights

  • The taxonomic urgency (Dubois, 2010a), i.e., the imperious need of an acceleration of our taxonomic inventory of the planet (Wheeler et al, 2004), is currently far from having been identified by our governments, by the decision-makers in matters of scientific research and by most scientific institutions

  • The vanishing species of our planet are not in the computers and sequencers of our cities, but in the threatened natural habitats, and the main limiting factor for the increase of our knowledge on animal and plant species is field work devoted to their discovery, study and collection in the wild (May, 2004)

  • This is much more urgent than clarifying their phylogenetic relationships or studying the modalities of their evolution, because evolution is not teleological: once they are extinct, all possible information about them will be lost and forever unavailable and no evolutionary theory or model, no “predictive taxonomy”, will ever tell us what these vanished species looked like and what were their characters

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Summary

Introduction

The taxonomic urgency (Dubois, 2010a), i.e., the imperious need of an acceleration of our taxonomic inventory of the planet (Wheeler et al, 2004), is currently far from having been identified by our governments, by the decision-makers in matters of scientific research and by most scientific institutions. The vanishing species of our planet are not in the computers and sequencers of our cities, but in the threatened natural habitats, and the main limiting factor for the increase of our knowledge on animal and plant species is field work devoted to their discovery, study and collection in the wild (May, 2004).

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