Back in November I published a paper in Zootaxa with new species and synonymies for Xenopygus Bernhauer. There are a lot of stories that can be told about this paper and if you are skilled in reading between the lines you can probably guess some by reading the paper itself.
But I want to tell one of the stories here. This is the story of how sometimes we are unable to deal with the backlog of specimens (perhaps data in general) until something happens. For many years I had two new species of Xenopygus awaiting description in my Xanthopygina cabinet. This is not unusual. By a quick count, I probably have ~100 new undescribed species of rove beetles trapped in the cabinet in front of my desk. But taxonomists do not spit out species description despite being urged to do so many times because we want to put these new species into context. That context is typically a revision of a genus, a phylogenetic analysis or fauna checklist.
But back to Xenopygus. I was sitting on these two new species because properly revising the genus meant dealing with thousands of specimens of one of the most common xanthopygine rove beetles, Xenopygus analis. It also meant changing the generic concept of Dysanellus (one of the described species there belonged in Xenopygus). And it also meant dealing with some bad taxonomic decisions made in the 70s-80s.
So I was waiting until, I do not know, I was ready to deal with them. The Xenopygus manuscript was probably no. 7 in my "in preparation" manuscripts. Well, that changed when Caron et al (2016) published a paper revising Xenopygus. I was not aware of that paper until it came out in Zootaxa. Which was unfortunate, because I would have told Caron et al. about all the problems mentioned above. Caron et al. published two new species that ended up being synonyms of taxa that had been described before. To their defense, it was almost impossible to figure this out unless they had seen photos (or examined) of every single species in Xanthopygina. But on the plus side, they dealt with the revisionary aspects of X. analis and that allow me quickly to publish the two new species and regrettably to synonymize the species they described as new.
I guess the story here is that we all need motivation in our lives. Sometimes motivation to finish that manuscript comes from places we do not expect.
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| Xenopygus davidi Chatzimanolis |
But back to Xenopygus. I was sitting on these two new species because properly revising the genus meant dealing with thousands of specimens of one of the most common xanthopygine rove beetles, Xenopygus analis. It also meant changing the generic concept of Dysanellus (one of the described species there belonged in Xenopygus). And it also meant dealing with some bad taxonomic decisions made in the 70s-80s.
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| Xenopygus pycnos Chatzimanolis |
So I was waiting until, I do not know, I was ready to deal with them. The Xenopygus manuscript was probably no. 7 in my "in preparation" manuscripts. Well, that changed when Caron et al (2016) published a paper revising Xenopygus. I was not aware of that paper until it came out in Zootaxa. Which was unfortunate, because I would have told Caron et al. about all the problems mentioned above. Caron et al. published two new species that ended up being synonyms of taxa that had been described before. To their defense, it was almost impossible to figure this out unless they had seen photos (or examined) of every single species in Xanthopygina. But on the plus side, they dealt with the revisionary aspects of X. analis and that allow me quickly to publish the two new species and regrettably to synonymize the species they described as new.
I guess the story here is that we all need motivation in our lives. Sometimes motivation to finish that manuscript comes from places we do not expect.
