Devilfish1962
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Name edit
Hi Devilfish,
Nomina nuda aren't true scientific names; they're really just placeholder names until the specimens they represent are described in a scientific paper. Many nomina nuda appear in David Lambert's book, The Ultimate Dinosaur Book, which was published in 1993. Those names appear in quotes instead of italics. There may have been earlier works which also wrote nomina nuda like that. Firsfron of Ronchester 03:22, 26 November 2009 (UTC)
- Hello, Devilfish1962;
- It's common practice for unofficial names, preoccupied names, and other similar cases to be formatted to set them apart from valid names. I've seen different ways of doing this; the Wikipedia method of non-italicized text in quotation marks is one way, but I don't know if it was ever codified somewhere. Here it's applied to nomina nuda ("Brontoraptor") and preoccupied names ("Ingenia" [italics kept because the genus is valid but needs to be renamed]).
- In the wider community, something similar is done for species thought to belong to genera other than the one they're currently in (for example, you may see something like "Dilophosaurus" sinensis; the species is valid but it's thought to belong to a different genus). J. Spencer (talk) 16:13, 26 November 2009 (UTC)