Reptilia

One of the premises for considering the name Testudo dussumieri as appropriate for the Aldabra tortoise is that Gray’s (1831, p. 9) brief diagnosis refers to a specimen in the Leiden Museum, allegedly collected by ‘M. Dussumiere’ on ‘Insula Aldebra’. Hubrecht (1881, p. 44) reported a ‘young specimen’ in the spirit collections of this museum, stating: ‘The locality from whence the specimen was brought is sharply fixed. Dussumier himself on his travels in the tropics collected it in the island of Aldabra . . .’. Recently, Bour (2006, p.

I am writing to you in strong support of Case 3463 to stabilise the name of the Aldabra tortoise. During my time as a research fellow at the Natural History Museum (London) I conducted phylogenetic and population genetic analyses of both living and museum material from the Seychelles, including Aldabra. At the time the nomenclatural instability was a major issue, for scientific understanding of the evolutionary history of these tortoises but more importantly for conservation of surviving populations.

I disagree with the proposal by Bock & Bühler to designate a neotype for Archaeopteryx lithographica because there is no demonstrated need to do so. First, there is no reasonable disagreement that the name was applied to the feather, the first specimen discovered, by Hermann von Meyer (1861). There is a possibility that von Meyer later intended the name also to apply to the first discovered skeletal specimen, which is now in the Natural History Museum in London, although this is ambiguous and in any case irrelevant, because the referral of the skeleton was secondary.

I completely support the petition to conserve the specific name Testudo gigantea Schweigger, 1812 for the Aldabra tortoise, although I used another name, Dipsochelys dussumieri in my paper (Takahashi et al., 2003). I agree with Frazier that T. gigantea is the established name. As explained in Case 3463, it has been in continuous use for more than 100 years and has been widely used in the scientific literature. It is important to settle this nomenclatural issue because there has been considerable confusion since 1982. The neotype for T.