Published on 14 April 2025
ICZN Case 12162: Designation of a neoneotype
Borg, Carreras, Liberstein, Arno-Hunderra, and Kitchen (2034) have been widely lauded as the geneticists behind the de-extinction of Palaeoloxodon falconeri (Busk, 1867). In particular, the YouTube video of their children riding the dwarf mammoths has enlivened an otherwise dusty field of taxonomy. However, their publication poses grave concerns to the stability of the available name. Specifically, section 18, titled “Neoneotypification of P. falconeri” states that their flagship product, “Gozo”, is to be considered as the neoneotype according to the Code. They provide a full description, complete with photogrammetrical scans.
The International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (1999) stipulates in Article 61 how species are to be typified. The International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature’s most recent version of the code (2030) added an addenda to this, Article 78, which specified how neoneotypification is to be performed. It was largely this addition, along with Article 34 (dealing with the abolition of grammatical gender in all Latin words by removing suffixes entirely), which led to the split that is now widely seen in science concerning the names of zootaxa. The authors have little to say on this subject that has not already been published elsewhere.
The grave concern is not with neoneotypification, but rather with achrononeoneotypification. In this case, it is clear the specimen “Gozo” is, in fact, not a clone of P. falconeri. Instead, a close examination of the available evidence shows that the cloning process was not a cloning process at all, but a case where the lab, situated in Mdina, Malta, was stuck in a temporal loop while the authors were working through routine tests. Discussing the loop stretches the available tenses in the English language, but our argument could be summed up like this: “Gozo” is not a clone, but the original P. falconeri brought forward in time, having been frozen in a time loop itself, and then presented as a clone. We present our evidence below.
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