Taxonomic Vandalism:
Fake Scientist Jane Melville of Melbourne, Australia has faked discoveries of nine previously named species!
Taxonomic Vandalism:
Fake Scientist Jane Melville of Melbourne, Australia has faked discoveries of nine previously named species!
What happens to a new scientist when other scientists have already discovered everything?
A good scientist will then either go out and seek further discoveries or check earlier works to confirm or refute their findings.
A bad scientist simply steals the work of others and then fakes it as their own discovery.
Sure this has been a thing since science first emerged as a discipline, but in recent years this phenomena of faking discoveries has taken on a whole new meaning.
You see, to discovery anything in science, you must be first.
It is that simple.
This is why Charles Darwin was credited with the discovery of the theory of evolution by natural selection.
He published his manifesto in the form of a book called The Origin of the Species.
He was the first to do so.
Sure, lots of people have decided Darwin was correct or alternatively made the same conclusions since Darwin’s publication in 1859.
But none of them have claimed to have discovered the idea or theory and no other scientist is remembered for it.
We’ll ignore Hinrich Kaiser and Wolfgang Wuster who in 2013 apparently decided that they had discovered evolution in 2013, basing their claim on the fact that Charles Darwin’s book had not been put through Wuster’s unique brand of peer review.
That, according to them, meant they could ignore Charles Darwin and his works as not being part of the scientific record.
In the modern age it has got harder and harder to make new discoveries.
It has been said that all the major things were discovered a long time ago and already.
There are also far more people working as scientists today than there was say, 200 years ago.
Science has really got a lot more competitive!
However, difficulty in making discoveries is not always the case when it comes to making scientific discoveries.
They still get made.
News media often trumpets new scientific discoveries to the world (even though a lot simply are not).
This is in part because as technologies advance, so too does the ability to make new discoveries.
In biological sciences, this is particularly the case. DNA science, often called molecular biology has led to a series of major advances in ways of detecting new species of animal and plant, including among groups that had until recently been thought of well-known and fully discovered.
The great age of naming and cataloguing new species of animals and plants using the Linnaean system invented in the 1700’s was in the 1800’s.
By 1900 it was thought that the majority of species had already been discovered and named.
At least that was the case with land vertebrates.
However, by the turn of this century molecular biology had turned that idea on its head. About a third of all reptile species seemed to be without scientific names. For frogs it was probably the majority.
For mammals, birds and fish, there appeared to be a lot of unnamed taxa.
With the modern crop of professionally paid scientists being ever keen to be known to have discovered something, the science of taxonomy had a major resurgence globally.
Snakeman Raymond Hoser did a massive audit of Australia’s reptiles, frogs and mammals over 2 decades using new technologies (molecular biology, biogeography, climate science, etc) in conjunction with older methods such as anatomy and so on to discover and name over 300 previously unnamed species of reptiles in Australia alone, nearly 100 species of frog in Australia and even over 20 mammals.
Normally this record would be held up as a high achievement and something to be admired.
But in the case of Hoser this success has turned out to be a serious irritant for other would-be scientists.
The problem is that there is nothing left for them to name!
So the name “Hoser” is hated by them!
One of these disgruntled so-called scientists is so called Doctor Jane Melville.
She landed a cushy gig at the Melbourne Museum in Victoria, where she gets paid a ton of cash to travel Australia looking for new species of reptiles to name.
She fancies herself as an expert on Dragon Lizards (AKA Agamids) and really had an urge to cement her name as the greatest ever expert on these reptiles.
Being an ego-driven scientist isn’t in itself a problem and most professional scientists are probably in this league.
Now what could be a better way to develop a reputation as the leading expert in your area of expertise than to cash in on the new wave of discovery to find and name species in Australia.
So Dr. Jane Melville, did at taxpayer’s expense, sent her minions across the Australian continent grabbing dragon lizards from every remote corner.
Back in Melbourne she used this new-fangled DNA technology to find dozens of species of dragon lizards that she at first thought were new to science.
Problem was that she was beaten there by three other scientists.
Two scientists, Richard Wells and Ross Wellington did a sweep of the continent in 1985 and named about 130 species for the first time. This was on top of the 550 odd known at the time.
These two were so hated by other Australian scientists, that the majority here in 1987 petitioned the International Commission of Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN), the governing body of scientific names to have the works of Wells and Wellington formally erased from the scientific record.
Had the petition succeeded, the petitioners could have legally renamed all the relevant species and claims to have discovered the lot.
The petition was stuck out by a near unanimous vote of the ICZN in 1991. A second attempt by the Wolfgang Wuster cohort finalised in 2001 also failed.
The ICZN stuck by the rule of priority, which meant that as always, the first scientist who made the discovery, should always be credited with it.
There would be no ifs, buts or maybes.
In the post year 2000 period, Snakeman Raymond Hoser did a major audit and in the following 20 years mopped up over 300 new species of reptile within Australia as well as a pile of subspecies.
In terms of Australia, that was pretty much all that was left.
Hoser did similar sweeps of major groups globally as well.
Pretty much all the species Melville thought she was discovering had in fact been discovered and named previously by Wells, Wellington and in particular Hoser!
Now in science, once a species has a name, that is it. As already known, it is called the rule of priority and obviously the only way a stable nomenclature for species can ever be built.
Typically if a scientist does their own new work and confirms a previous thesis, they cite the earlier work and note that their own work confirms the same thing.
This is what has happened for the theory of evolution for the past 200 years!
It is also what has been the case in terms of taxonomy and nomenclature for the last 200 years as well.
However, a growing band of fake scientists instead see their time as wasted if they cannot claim to have discovered something.
Jane Melville is one of these people.
Rather than facing up to the reality that virtually all the dragon lizards in Australia have been discovered and named well before she entered the scene in the post 2010 period, she wants to fake discoveries to make out that she has done all the work.
Rather than admit that the dominant force in discovering and naming new species of reptiles in Australia, including in particular her own beloved dragon lizards is the Snakeman Raymond Hoser, Melville has engaged in a dishonest course of stealing Hoser’s earlier works and faking the same discoveries as her own.
Scientific rules as administered by the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN) mandate the rule of priority to stop science descending into chaos.
That is, the older name is the correct name and the one that should be used.
So what exactly are all these scientific discoveries Melville has been faking?
What are the species she has falsely claimed to have discovered.
The list that we know of as of 30 June 2024 is published below.
That is nine species she has lied about by claiming she has discovered and nine species thare are now subject of a destabilizing dual nomenclature she is unlawfully peddling in breach of the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature as published by the ICZN as well as the Australian Copyright Act 1968.
Just remember, her names are the wrong ones and should not be used.
The rule of priority and the correct names are the older ones.
The nine illegally coined names are as follows:
Lophognathus horneri Melville et al., 2018 is an illegally coined junior synonym of Lophognathus wellingtoni Hoser, 2015
Tympanocryptis argillosa Melville et al. 2019 is an illegally coined junior synonym of Tympanocryptis optus Hoser, 2019.
Tympanocryptis darlingensis Chaplin, Wilson, Sumner & Melville, 2023 is an illegally coined junior synonym of Tympanocryptis deniselivingstonae Hoser, 2019
Tympanocryptis hobsoni Chaplin, Wilson, Sumner & Melville, 2023 is an illegally coined junior synonym of Tympanocryptis courtneyleitchae Hoser, 2019
Tympanocryptis einasleighensis Chaplin, Wilson, Sumner & Melville, 2023 is an illegally coined junior synonym of Tympanocryptis karimdaouesi Hoser, 2019
Tympanocryptis osbornei Melville et al. 2019 is an illegally coined junior synonym of Tympanocryptis lineata Peters, 1863.
Tympanocryptis petersi Melville et al. 2019 is an illegally coined junior synonym of Tympanocryptis snakebustersorum Hoser, 2019.
Tympanocryptis rustica Melville et al. 2019 is an illegally coined junior synonym of Tympanocryptis lachlanheffermani Hoser, 2019.
Tympanocryptis tolleyi Melville et al. 2019 is an illegally coined junior synonym of Tympanocryptis vodafone Hoser, 2019.
Also it is worth noting that Jane Melville also illegally renamed the genus Melvillesaurea Hoser, 2015 as Tropicagama in 2018 as well.
She has been getting people to use that name as correct since then, fully aware that her name is an illegally coined synonym of Melvillesaurea and that Melvillesaurea is in fact the correct genus name.
To learn more, see:
Hoser, R. T. 2024. Taxonomic vandalism by Wolfgang Wuster and his gang of thieves. Yet more illegally coined names by the rule breakers for species and genera previously named according to the rules of the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature.
Australasian Journal of Herpetology 72:47-63.
That can be downloaded at:
https://www.smuggled.com/AJH-72-pages-47-63.pdf
Also see:
Hoser, R. T. 2019 11 new species, 4 new subspecies and a subgenus of Australian Dragon Lizard in the genus Tympanocryptis Peters, 1863, with a warning on the conservation status and long-term survival prospects of some newly named taxa. Australasian Journal of Herpetology 39:23-52.
That can be downloaded at:
https://www.smuggled.com/issue-39-pages-23-52.pdf
See also:
Hoser, R. T. 2019. Richard Shine et al. (1987), Hinrich Kaiser et al. (2013), Jane Melville et al. (2018 and 2019): Australian Agamids and how rule breakers, liars, thieves, taxonomic vandals and law breaking copyright infringers are causing reptile species to become extinct. Australasian Journal of Herpetology 39:23-52.
That can be downloaded at:
https://www.smuggled.com/issue-39-pages-53-63.pdf
In case it was missed, the newer papers of Jane Melville and her cohort of thieves engaging in taxonomic vandalism was also written by the same cohort who have been flooding online journals with calls to eliminate patronyms from nomenclature and yet they continue to create them with their ongoing anarchy and contempt for the rules of science.
Further background on this can be found here at:
Wuster gang slammed by ICZN for egregious taxonomic vandalism
Further background information follows:
Taxonomic vandalism, as being practiced by Wolfgang Wuster and members of his cohort of thieves is best described as the deliberate and illegal renaming of species in breach of the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature is an extremely damaging action.
It is often done for the ego of the taxonomic vandal, who then pretends to have made discoveries they have not done.
However taxonomic vandalism is also extremely destructive and wasteful of the time and works of later scientists who then ahve to correct the deliberate mistakes of fraudsters like Melville.
Meanwhile as scientists get diverted by stupid and avoidable naming issues, relevant species become extinct.
One such case involving Melville and her cohort of thieves was detailed by Snakeman Raymond Hoser in a paper published in 2019.
That paper can be downloaded here:
Hoser, R. T. 2019. Richard Shine et al. (1987), Hinrich Kaiser et al. (2013), Jane Melville et al. (2018 and
2019): Australian Agamids and how rule breakers, liars, thieves, taxonomic vandals and law breaking copyright infringers are causing reptile species to become extinct. Australasian Journal of Herpetology 39:53-63. Published 12 June 2019.
Jane Melville's earlier "in house" papers that also illegally renamed species discovered by other scientists can be found by way of search online and are the following:
Melville, J., Ritchie, E. G., Chapple, S. N. J., Glor, R. E. and Schulte, J. A. 2018. Diversity in Australia’s tropical savannas: An
integrative taxonomic revision of agamid lizards from the genera Amphibolurus and Lophognathus (Lacertilia: Agamidae). Memoirs of Museum Victoria 77:41-61 (online).
and
Melville, J., Chaplin, K., Hutchinson, M., Sumner, J., Gruber, B., MacDonald, A.J. and Sarre, S. D. 2019. Taxonomy and conservation of grassland earless dragons: new species and an assessment of the first possible extinction of a reptile on mainland
Australia. R. Soc. open sci. 6:190233. (24 pp. and supplements) (online).
See also:
Jane Melville, Scientific Fraud, 2020
and
Jane Melville, falsely claims discovery of previously named species
and
Jane Melville, yet more egregious taxonomic vandalism!
and
Crocodile species discovery was faked!
RAYMOND HOSER is the world’s foremost reptile expert . He has been single-handedly leading the way in saving the world’s most threatened and endangered species. Raymond Hoser is the Snakeman. Details of his work here.
28 April 2018 - Spectacular new species of large spiky lizard discovered in the Mount Isa area. ...
Raymond Hoser, is The Snakeman.
He has been a leader in science and conservation of wildlife for over 50 years.
He is known to pretty much everyone in the wildlife space as the leader in the fight to save rare and threatened species.
For decades he has been making important scientific discoveries and breakthroughs that have literally saved dozens of species from extinction.
In the 1980’s he was the first to mass breed snakes using methods that are now standard practice globally.
Hoser was also the first to mass breed snakes and lizards using artificial insemination using a method now used by zoos and private breeders across the planet.
Hoser was the first to dramatically improve the welfare of venomous snakes in captivity by developing a pain free way to surgically remove venom glands from snakes, thereby removing risk of venomous bite to handler and the need to attack them daily with sticks and tongs for wildlife shows.
Hoser has also appeared on countless TV wildlife documentaries, worked behind the scenes in many more, authored nine major books, contributed to dozens of others, authored hundreds of major peer reviewed scientific papers, collaborated with other scientists in countless scientific projects, publications and the like, got countless major awards, prizes and the like for his works, including an award two years running from the International Herpetological Society in the UK for best scientific paper published the previous year, and was also the first person on the planet to successfully develop dog snake avoidance training to protect people's canine pets from venomous snakebite.
But where the snakeman has become best known in recent decades is for his stellar work in discovering and cataloguing new species of reptile from across the planet.
Over decades, he has discovered and formally named hundreds of species of snake and lizard from all parts of the globe, as well as a smattering of species such as snapping turtles in the USA and Australia, frogs, crocodiles, spiders and even a possum. In fact the Snakeman Raymond Hoser is often described as a taxonomist powerhouse in view of the sheer volume of species he has managed to discover and name.
Of course no species can be conserved by people if it is unknown to science and this is exactly why Hoser has been so keen to catalogue the planet’s threatened biodiversity.
While how many species a person has discovered and named is not the only measure of the work done by a zoologist, it is one way to do so and is widely used. On that measure, Hoser easily outclasses all others in the reptile space. In fact no one born in the last 150 years has discovered and named as many species as Snakeman Raymond Hoser.
For those wondering why Hoser has become famous for naming new species, it is simple really. The names of Hoser, as regulated by the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature of the species appear in all relevant books and scientific paper and next to each scientific name is published the name of the discoverer, called name authority, and the year in which they published it. So in most books reptile the name Hoser appears throughout!
Back in the 1800’s it was easy for scientists to discover and name new species as the Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus devised the current system of nomenclature in the late 1700’s. So back then everything was fair game to be scientifically "discovered" and named for the first time. Since about 1900, all the easy to discover vertebrates had been named and it really did take a lot of work to go into the wilds to find and name new species.
Hoser has also been criticized for naming so many species by a vocal minority in the reptile space. The general jist has been along the lines that by naming species, he is depriving others of the right. Hoser’s retorts are simple, “go find something and name it … even with reptiles, there are thousands of unnamed species still out there”.
Furthermore, Hoser says that if he delays naming the relevant species, they may well become extinct, while others dither over them.
In fact this has already occurred!
In 2016, Hoser formally named about 10 new species of Pacific Boa (Candoia) in a major monograph. By then however some were already probably extinct as feral animals, such as mongoose, had exterminated them on the islands they’d previously occurred on.
More recently, Hoser has been victim of a new form of scourge attacking the wider zoological community.
This is taxonomic vandalism.
To the uninformed, this is when a so-called scientist deliberately renames a species that already has a scientific name and then in breach of the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature, tries to get the illegally coined name used instead of the correct one.
In 2013, Hoser discovered and named a species of Forest Cobra from west Africa. Five years later a Welsh university lecturer, named Wolfgang Wüster illegally renamed it with his own coined name, falsely claiming to have discovered the species.
The damage caused by Wüster’s taxonomic vandalism cannot be understated as the species is dangerous to humans and confusion in identification can and will cause avoidable deaths.
Hoser says, pseudo-scientists and anti-scientists like Wuster are not only putting lives at risk, but wasting time of genuine scientists like himself who then have to waste time correcting their deliberate mistakes. This is time that could be better spent doing other things, including cataloguing other as yet unnamed species!
In years past it was difficult to ascertain whether or not a given potential new species had been named by another scientist. However now there are excellent so-called synonyms lists available and this makes the job of identifying unnamed species much easier and is one of the reasons that Hoser has been able to name so many new species.
Hoser said “If I wasn’t so tied up with my other critically important work doing educational wildlife displays, including kids reptile parties, I could go out and name over 1,000 more reptile species within a few short years, if only I had the time to do so”.
Hoser hopes other scientists and scientists in training engage in the science of naming species and not just for reptiles, because as of 2018, most of the planet’s biological diversity remains unnamed and therefore at greater risk of extinction.
However Hoser warns, “If taxonomic vandals like Wolfgang Wuster are allowed to get away with stealing the works of others and then illegally renaming the same species, this will seriously deter conservation-minded people from putting in the necessary effort to discover and name new species in the first place”.
In 2018, Wolfgang Wüster simply lifted the work of the Hoser (2013) paper and repackaged it as his own in an online PRINO Journal called Zootaxa.
PRINO is an acronym for the words, peer reviewed in name only, which is exactly how the online journal Zootaxa works.
The improper claim of formal peer review is made to enhance the alleged credibility of the paper by the taxonomic vandal, Wuster.
The International Commission of Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN), who govern scientific names of animals, have had a serious problem in dealing with online journals such as Zootaxa which by using the online model, now make it easier for taxonomic vandals like Wuster to spread their toxic non-science more widely.
Wüster and his cohort, haven't just decided to steal the works of Raymond Hoser and falsely claim it as his own. His gang of thieves have attacked the works of dozens of other scientists, including the late John Edward Gray of the British Museum, who died about 150 years ago and therefore cannot defend his works from being stolen by Wuster's gang.
Fortunately other scientists will defend the science of zoology and have already taken steps to stop Wuster and like minded thieves from disrupting the science of taxonomy and the associated work of conservationists.
For example in 1991, in a near unanimous decision, the Wuster gang was stopped in their tracks by the International Commission for Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN) trying to illegally rename hundreds of species and genera discovered and named by eminent Australian scientists Richard Wells and Ross Wellington, but this has not stopped his gang from still trying to do so.
In other words, taxonomic vandalism as practiced by Wolfgang Wuster will not only cause scientists like Raymond Hoser grief and time wasted, but also cause the extinction of species and even the science powerhouse Raymond Hoser cannot stop that!
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