Hi you all,

suffices - suffixes - endings. All this are artifacts of an old fashioned
view of systematics. We shall have a look on the Linnean systematics: he
defined species, genera, families, orders and and and. And finally we do so,
too. But we forget that there was a gene flux which led to the species (what
ever we use as a species concept). But no one can exactly say, what a family
is, or a suborder. Ten species are a genus? Four genera are a family? And
what about monospecific orders???
Probably it took less time for "evolving" a family called "Mutelidae" (or
the first representative showing the characters of a mutelid) in the taxon
Bivalvia than for a family called "Turdidae" in the taxon Aves. So we should
start looking for a system reflecting the phylogenetic relationships and
then we can see that all such suffixes do not play a role, because the
natural unit "species" cannot be pressed in clusters of families, and other
man-made units. Relationships are defined by the relationships among the
natural taxa and not by those proposed in the Linnean systematics. Carl von
Linne was indeed a great scientist (although he thought Barn Swallows rest
on the bottom of lakes in the winter...), but most of his systematics are
old-fashioned seen in the light of modern phylogenetic research...

Best wishes, Andreas

Dr. Andreas Leistikow
Welsingheide 160
48163 Munster / Germany