Devilfish1962

Welcome!

Hello, Devilfish1962, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

• The five pillars of Wikipedia
• Tutorial
• How to edit a page and How to develop articles
• How to create your first article (using the Article Wizard if you wish)
• Manual of Style

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on discussion pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place {{helpme}} before the question. Again, welcome! Firsfron of Ronchester 03:22, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

Name

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)

Hi, Devilfish, I didn't really understand what you were asking, but J Spencer seems to have addressed the matter rather nicely. If you need any more help or info, just ask and I'll do all I can to help. Abyssal (talk) 19:24, 26 November 2009 (UTC)