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3 Comments

1. Lab Lemming says:

   14 September 2011 at 23:03

   By this reasoning, “Thursday” is archaic, since nobody associates it with the Norse god Thor anymore.

   For that matter, the entire Paleozoic is divided up into periods named after tribes that were extinct at the time of naming. They’ve always been archaic.

   And the quaternary science people are too busy arguing about when the quaternary starts to consider giving their term up.

   Note that the cartoon’s author hasn’t even tried to defend Paleogene and Neogene.

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   • Callan says:

     15 September 2011 at 12:31

     Thanks for weighing in, Chuck. You raise an excellent point – what word of any respectable vintage in the English language doesn’t have a history to it?
     The difference in Jack’s mind (I’ll presume to speak for him) is one of scientific intent: Thursday isn’t a scientific concept, while the Tertiary is. Naming periods (or formations, or minerals, or rocks, or species) for type localities (or ancient tribes who lived in those localities, or in tribute to some individual person or some collection of persons) is a long and honored tradition. Jack feels that the names we use need to reflect some essential characteristic of the rocks, periods, minerals, fossils, or formations that we study. He is not suggesting we change the name of the Cambrian arthropod Waptia merely because it’s since been found at locations other than Mt. Wapta. Jack is not suggesting we change the name of the Belt Supergroup because it’s found in places other than the Big Belt and Little Belt Mountains. Those names express a scientific fact – that you can go to Mt. Wapta or the Belts, and look around there for insight into those critters, or those rocks, respectively.

     In contrast, Teritary is a literal expression of a sequential idea; the ‘third’ period of geologic time. That idea is the problem; the name only expresses (accurately) the idea. In contrast, Jack would find no problem with the use of Jurassic, because there are indeed rocks of Jurassic age in the Jura Mountains of Switzerland. He would, however, take issue with Cretaceous, since it represents an idea (chalkiness) that cannot be applied to all Cretaceous-aged strata. It’s the difference between “This is where we first described it” and “this is how it is.” With Tertiary, the name implies two periods before, and some ordinal number of periods afterwards. That’s the thing that gets stuck in poor Jack’s craw.

     As for Paleogene and Neogene, the stratigraphers making the change were doubtless more motivated by stratigraphic issues (better definition of the earliest period of the Cenozoic), not merely the pedantry about linguistic particulars that so occupies Jack’s mind.

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2. Thomas R. Holtz, Jr. says:

   15 September 2011 at 14:17

   One more note, too: “Quaternary” was restored as a full period (the Holocene and an expanded Pleistocene) by the ICS. So the Cenozoic presently has three periods: Paleogene, Neogene, and Quaternary.

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