I can’t speak for everyone, but I don’t think anyone in this thread suggested that mahi mahi was a mammal.
Dolphin vs. porpoise is another one. The thing I learned in childhood is that dolphins have a prominent snout as bottlenose dolphins are the archetypal species. But there are plenty of dolphins with blunt noses, and the distinction is apparently in the tooth shape. I think that this was not something that we later learned though but just something that was oversimplified for children.
Also pigeon vs. dove: no clear reason why one species is called one vs. the other. The common city pigeon is also known as rock dove. I guess the ones that got the dove name had better PR firms.
When I was a kid, back in the early 1970s, I had a bunch of small plastic toy dinosaurs, each of which had the dinosaur’s common name molded into the plastic somewhere. The one that was shaped like brontosaurus/apatosaurus definitely said “Apatosaurus.” There was no plastic Brontosaurus. I remember that because one time an adult assumed my apatosaurus was a brontosaurus and I proudly corrected him.
So it wasn’t just scientists pushing the name apatosaurus. You can also blame the toy industry.
(If they really were two separate species, I’m fine with that.)
In ordinary speech, “cow” can be used to refer to males or females of any age. For whatever reason English doesn’t have a singular for “cattle,” so “cow” now does double duty.
Summary: The brontosaurus and the apatosaurus are not different names for the same critter. The “brontosaurus” was the result of mistakenly putting a camarasaurus skull on an apatosaurus skeleton. Once the error was discovered, “the term brontosaurus thus lost its official standing.”
It’s outdated, though. The term “brontosaurus” is alleged by some at least to have regained scientific standing; in an influential 2015 paper, the argument was made that the specimens referred to as “brontosaurus” are, in fact, distinct.
It’s also factually wrong. As I already stated, though I was running on memory and had misremembered a few details, including consistently misspelling the specific name of the Brontosaurus type specimen. (This article is old, from before the research that suggested Brontosaurus was in fact, a valid genus.)
Short version - the headless specimen was named Brontosaurus excelsus right from the start, several years before Marsh drew a reconstruction including a conjectural skull - which was based on skull fragments from several other sauropods, including Camarasaurus - and even more years before a complete Camarasaurus skull was found, or any Brontosaurus skeleton was ever mounted.
Octopodes is cromulent, but risks sounding too pretentious. Octopi can be used facetiously, like virii (which if you look carefully, makes zero sense), but seriously is too much.
“Octopi” has become an accepted variant in English, even though the etymology of that variant makes no sense, or rather is based on a false belief in the Latin origin of the word (and a false knowledge of Latin grammar!). Octopodes may be “cromulent”, but it is a less accepted variant of the (now-English) word “octopus”.
From the second link:
’
The Oxford English dictionary I think has it right: it lists octopuses, octopi, and octopodes (the order reflecting decreasing frequency of use), stating that the last form is rare. All three are “correct”, but in decreasing order of “correctness” corresponding with decreasing usage; “octopodes”, while the “most correct” from a purely etymological POV, is the “least correct” based on use in the English language.
Well, it should be. Scientific naming should use popular consensus as a basis for determining nomenclature.
For example, if the public uses the word “monkey” to encompass chimpanzees, then the scientific community should not adopt a definition of “monkey” that is inconsistent with this. If the public uses the word “bear” to encompass koalas, then the scientific community should not use the word “bear” to exclude koalas.
