Carcharhinus obsolerus, White, Kyne & Harris, 2019, White, Kyne & Harris, 2019

White, William T., Kyne, Peter M. & Harris, Mark, 2019, The correct spelling of the nomen of the lost shark Carcharhinus obsolerus White, Kyne & Harris, 2019 (Chondrichthyes, Carcharhinidae), Zootaxa 4657 (3), pp. 599-600 : 599

When

the word obsolerus is entered into BHL’s search engine, seven records are found representing four different publications. In each of these cases, the original publication includes the epithet obsoletus , but the optical character recognition software used by BHL is detecting the word as obsolerus in its search function (“Search Inside” tool). These are as follows: Casey (1892) —p. 618, [ Calandrinus ] obsoletus (in key); Sharpe (1899) —p. 285, brucei (Hume) … [ obsoletus, Cab. J. f. O. 1875, p. 126]; Iverson (1977) —p. 360 (references), Eumeces obsoletus ; and van den Elzen & König (1983) —p. 184, Dendrocopos (Ipophilus) o. obsoletus . In Casey (1892), character recognition software detected obsoletus in the last couplet of the key at the top of page 618 as obsolerus , but detected obsoletus correctly in the index on page 714. Furthermore, on page 620, obsoletus is detected by the character recognition software as obsoletllS despite being the same bold font as on page 618.

Thus, it appears that the appearance of the word obsolerus has entered the various translation applications through incorrect optical character recognition results. Consequently, the nomen for the lost shark must be corrected to Carcharhinus obsoletus as correctly suggested by Dubois & Séret (2019). This case highlights the need for due diligence in obtaining Latin names for species descriptions. Online translation services should not be relied upon without confirming the Latin words in dedicated Latin dictionaries.