I thought it might be an interesting notion to make announcements regarding recent taxonomic changes made from the literature aimed at people who are not reading fastidiously The Systematic Journal of....... (or whatever) every passing moment of the day...Here..we have an attractive deep-sea goniasterid starfish from the tropical Atlantic/Gulf of Mexico, formerly known from as Tosia parva (as seen in Starfishes of the Atlantic by Clark & Downey 1992) and originally described as Pentagonaster parvus by Edmond Perrier in 1881.
A recent paper by Mah 2006 using a phylogeny based on morphological data separates this beast from the Indo-Pacific members of the Australian genus Tosia and establishes it within a new genus named for Dr. David Pawson, curator of echinoderms at the Smithsonian in honor of his contribution to our knowledge of deep-sea echinoderms from the tropical Atlantic!
Well, I confess, I do not keep up with the taxonomic journals as I once did (...in the days of my youth).
ReplyDeleteThanks!