Who was the youngest person to publish the formal scientific name of a newly discovered species?
I don’t know. The thing to remember is that the actual formal naming is done by formal naming organsiations, usually museums, herbariums etc. The person discovering a new species, even if they know it is clearly a new species, have to send it to one of these organisations to get it formally named. Since working for such an organsiation requires formal tertiary quaifications, at leats today, I’d suspect that no one under the age of 18 has ever done such a thing.
This is completely incorrect. Until recent revisions to the Zoological Code of Nomenclature, really the only requirement was that someone (anyone, really) had to publish a binomial name (usually latinized) for a species, and give the characteristics by which that species can be distinguished from other related species. Valid scientific names have been published by complete amateurs; valid scientific names have been published in newspapers.
Yeah, but just because it’s “published” (I think you actually mean printed), especially in something as scientifically disrespectable as the newspaper, doesn’t mean that any respectable scientists would actually accept and use it.
Of course, if the name is published (in the peer-reviewed journal sense) in a scientific paper, that may be a different story.
kuniochi, I am a professional biologist and quite familiar with the ICZN. I work with taxonomists all the time. (And no, I don’t mean “printed,” I mean “published” in the sense of publicly disseminated.)
It doesn’t matter where a name is published, whether magazine, newspaper, or scientific journal, as long as it is valid - that is, has the binomial format and gives distinguishing characteristics of a taxon. And whether or not a name is generally ‘accepted’ is an entirely different issue from whether or not it is valid (in the techical sense). A name that has been validly published cannot be used again, even if it turns out the description itself is inaccurate.
From here;
That’s pretty much it - nothing about peer-reviewed journals.
To get back to the OP:
One guess would be Edward Drinker Cope. Cope was a paleontologist/ichthyologist/herpetologist, and a child prodigy who published his first scientific papers in his late teens. I’m not sure if the earliest ones were species descriptions or not.
Whether or not Cope was the youngest, I would not be at all surprised if valid species descriptions have been published by others in their teens.
OK Col, if you mean publish the formal scientific name as in ‘someone said it had a name’ and publihed then yeah. If you mean naming as in accepted standard then no.
Bit like asking when the frst report on the physiological effcts of spaceflight was published and citing Jules Verne.
Ok before you get your knickers in a twist, realize that I was talking about the post AFTER yours (by Colibri). And “Reasonably permanent” hardly refers to a newspaper, if you use the ICZN definition.
I don’t think you understand what the “accepted standard” is.
It takes very little to publish an “officially accepted” scientific name for an organism (and took even less before the revisions to the ICZN in 2000). It can be accomplished in a few sentences, even now. And once a name has been published it is “official,” in the sense that it the name must be recognized by any taxonomist dealing with that taxon in the future, even if they do not accept the designation of that taxon as a separate species. This has absolutely nothing to do with how well and how completely the description has been written.
There are many species, universally recognized as full species by biologists, whose original description was very poor. Likewise there are forms whose original description was very complete and professional, which are not generally recognized as full species. The decision as to whether something is really a full species or not often depends on studies carried out by others after the initial species description.
Which post were you talking about? Mine or Colibri’s?
In any case, in the past newspaper publication has most assuredly been acceptable as a “reasonably permanent” form of publication according to the standards of the ICZN.
In fact, it Edward Drinker Cope himself published some descriptions of fossil species in newspapers in order to scoop his rival in the “Bone Wars” of the late nineteenth century, Othniel C. Marsh.
Okay, color me fascinated! Can you give any examples of this? It just sounds… Weird!
End of round: Colibri a mile ahead on points, with several knock-downs.
What the hell are you talking about?
My wife’s father is a paleontologist, somewhat well-known to people in the field. In published papers wherein he is the first to describe several organisms, he named two of the little beasties after his daughters. I won’t use real names for privacy concerns, but think of something like Prognathus elizabethii.
These aren’t “just his” names for the animals. They are the names. And they weren’t assigned by some committee, either, based on some objective criterion or metric or cladistic standard or whatever, as you seem to imply. If that were the case, there’s no way the committee would have chosen his two daughters. My wife’s father picked the names. Period.
You can also read in one of the Far Side books about an entomologist who wrote Gary Larson to inform him that a species of louse (or some other parasite) had been named after the cartoonist by the scientist.
I agree with Colibri. I think you don’t know what you’re talking about.
I have nothing to add, just that I hope you’re right, Colibri and Cervaise.
Not that there’s any reason you wouldn’t be, since you seem to know what you’re talking about. It’s refreshing to learn that it’s such a simple process 
Homo sapiens being an excellent example of this…
One example: “Lawrence’s Warbler”, originally described as Helminthophaga Lawrencii (Herrick 1875), and “Brewster’s Warbler” Helminthophaga leucobronchialis (Brewster 1874) were validly described as species but turn out to be hybrids between the Blue-winged Warbler Vermivora pinus and Golden-winged Warbler Vermivora chrysoptera. The names are technically valid (“available”) in a taxonomic sense but do not apply to real species. They may not be used for any other species to be described in the future.
Another famous example is Brontosaurus. The name is valid (available) in a taxonomic sense, but it has been found to be a junior synonym of Apatosaurus, and by the rule of priority, the latter name is the technically correct one.Brontosaurus may not be re-used for any other taxon. Both names, incidentally, were proposed by Marsh, Cope’s rival.
The Weak Force: Of course I’m right. 
I’m not sure if this is exactly what Colibri was referring to, but once a name has been published (in whatever form), even if it is later found that the specimen more properly belongs to another genus and/or species, the latter name (assuming it was valid to begin with) becomes a synonym of the former. An example would be Brontosaurus, named by the aforementioned Marsh. When other researchers examined Marsh’s Brontosaurus specimen, they found that it was essentially the same as Marsh’s Apatosaurus. Thus, Brontosaurus became a “junior subjective synonym” of Apatosaurus.
However, even though the name Brontosaurus is no longer considered “correct”, it still cannot be re-used.