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Problems of Ammonite-Nomenclature X. The Naming of Pathological Specimens

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 May 2009

L. F. Spath
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Pathological individuals or monstrosities of ammonites (kakomorphs in Buckman’s terminology) have long been known and some have, rightly or wrongly, been given specific names. Indeed, they probably include a genus, namely Nipponites, Yabe, 1904, based on a unique specimen, the incredible tangle of which may represent only an extreme monstrosity of one of those Nostoceratids (Didymoceras, Emperoceras, etc.) which normally began life with a hamitid or ptychoceratid shell, then changed to a turricone and finished up with a helicoid body-chamber, often combining dextral and sinistral coiling in the same individual. A few authors have taken delight in collecting and describing such “cripples” (Engel, 1894, 1909; Wingrave, 1929); to other palaeontologists, however, they have caused nomenclatorial difficulties. Thus Crick (1901), when recording as Ammonites ramsayanus, Sharpe, a monstrosity in the Bath Museum, had to confess that Sharpe’s type specimen certainly was deformed and he thought the Bath specimen was also a malformation. Yet he added “being unable to refer them to any other species which had hitherto been described from the Chalk, it seemed desirable to retain, at least provisionally, Sharpe’s name”. Crick should have known, of course, that a specific name may be valid or invalid, but that it cannot be provisional. In other papers, however, dealing with deformed ammonites, Crick (1898, 1899, 1918) found the nomenclature less embarrassing.

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Geological Magazine , Volume 82 , Issue 6 , December 1945 , pp. 251 - 255
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1945

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