About Authors, Authorities and Auctors
In botany, an alpha taxonomist who names taxa is called an auctor, from the scholastic term for author. In zoology, the term auctor has been replaced with the terms "author" or "authority". A scientist who attempts to describe new taxa has to be intimately familiar with all the previously published scientific literature on that group of organisms. This is necessary in order to avoid errors such as describing an already-named species (thus creating an unnecessary junior synonym) or using a species name that is already taken. The literature on any one group of organisms often spans centuries, and is often written in several different languages, making alpha taxonomy very much the realm of specialists.
Once a species (or any other taxonomic unit) is named, the name of the auctor is associated with the description. In zoology, the full formal name of a species contains not only the Latin binomial (genus and species name), but also the name of the original authority and the year of the original publication. While the overall name of a species may change (usually by the species being transferred to a new genus) the authority name and year still apply. The zoological code is considered to have started in 1758 with the 10th edition of Systema Naturæ. Many of the most well known animals thus have (Linnaeus, 1758) as the author-date, e.g. the common earth worm, Lumbricus terrestris (Linnaeus, 1758).
Names of certain very prolific authorities are sometimes abbreviated; this was quite common during the early years of Linnaean taxonomy. It is no longer done in zoology, but a system of abbreviations is still used in botany. Many of the more well known species of plants were described by Carl Linnaeus in Species Plantarum, published in 1753, and this is considered the formal starting point for the botanical code. Thus the common buttercup is Ranunculus acris L., where the 'L' is the standardised abbreviation for Linnaeus. Unlike in zoology, the date (year) is not usually given. The same style of abbreviated author names can be found in old zoological work, and was kept the longest for Linnaeus himself, e.g. the tiger can be found as "Panthera tigris (L., 1758)" in older works.
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