Goodbye Ajacingenia, and good riddance!

[ZoPteryx]

There once was a well preserved oviraptorid name Ingenia yashini in 1981, but the name Ingenia was preoccupied by nematode, so it became invalid.  In 2013, someone came along an renamed the genus Ajacingenia.  While technically valid, this new name didn't sit well with most researchers, because the namer made no attempt to inform or include any of the original authors in their paper, portions of which were highly suspected to be plagiarized.  But what are you gonna do?

The answer is: Lump It!  Sure, they could've just ignored that name and wait for it to sink into obscurity, as most had done, but these authors had a better solution suggested to them by Andrea Cau (full story in the second link), why not lump "Ingenia"/Ajacingina with Heyuannia?  The two share a lot in common, and what little they don't could be chalked up into species variation.  Certainly other dinosaurs have been lumped over less.  The best part was that Heyuannia as named in 2002, and thus had priority over Ajacingenia.  So now we can breath a sigh of relief and welcome Heyuannia yashini, uncontroversial at last.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0031018217306065

http://theropoda.blogspot.com/2017/11/una-soluzione-etica-e-sostanziale.html

[Sim]

I read about the Ajancingenia situation some time ago, and I also read about this synonymisation.  After considering it though, I don't have a problem with the name Ajancingenia.  It was definitely wrong for Jesse Easter to publish Mickey Mortimer's work without permission or credit.  Easter did publish an erratum acknowledging this: http://dml.cmnh.org/2013Dec/msg00131.html

The reason I don't have a problem with the name Ajancingenia is I don't think it receiving that name was wrong.  While reading about it, I came across the Wikipedia Talk page for Ajancingenia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Ajancingenia
I feel "MMartyniuk" made some very good points there:

There is no requirement that original authors get first dibs at renaming, and Barsbold had over 20 years to do so with no action taken. Furthermore, the name itself was not plagiarized, just the accompanying description, which is not something the ICZN is concerned with. Species pre-occupied, species needs new name, species gets new name. The paper could (and looks like it should) have been three sentences long.

While I do think original authors should be the first to have the chance to rename a species, I understand there's no requirement for this.  And as MMartyniuk said, Barsbold had over 20 years to do so, and still didn't.  When you know a species has a preoccupied name, I think it shouldn't take a long time before renaming it.  My understanding is it's quite easy to give a species with a preoccupied name a new name.

Anyway, I don't mind considering Ajancingenia a synonym of Heyuannia.  Something that's been bothering me for a while now is that I feel some dinosaur genera are over-split.  Maybe giving a new species their own genus means no assumptions are made about how closely related they are to other species.  I think though, some species are so similar that it would make sense for them to be in the same genus, as if either ends up being closer to a species discovered later, this new species will also be so similar that it fits in the genus.  At the moment, whether species are similar enough to belong to the same genus seems inconsistently applied among dinosaurs, which I think can be misleading.  Among ceratopsids for example, the amount of difference between the three species of Pachyrhinosaurus seems the same as the amount of difference between Centrosaurus apertus, Coronosaurus and Spinops and in both cases the three species form a natural group with each other.  I can only wonder why Mojoceratops was named as its own genus when it forms a natural group with the two Chasmosaurus species, and it's so like Chasmosaurus russelli that some palaeontologists have suggested Mojoceratops is the same animal as C. russelli.  I don't like thinking this, but sometimes when new dinosaur genera are named, they are so similar to existing genera that it feels like the reason they were given a new genus and not made a new species in an existing genus is for the sake of a person's career.

A somewhat similar situation to that of Ajancingenia, of renaming a preoccupied theropod species in a non-admirable way happened with Megapnosaurus.  Like how Ajancingenia has now been synonymised with a similar existing genus getting rid of the disliked name, this also happened with Megapnosaurus by synonymising it with Coelophysis.  Recently, I've noticed there's been some effort to revive the name Megapnosaurus.  I find this unpleasant, like how the whole situation with Megapnosaurus is unpleasant.  rhodesiensis is nearly identical to Ceolophysis bauri, so giving it it's own genus (Megapnosaurus) again doesn't make sense to me.  If it's because it's slightly closer to other coelophysids now, why not make those species of Coelophysis as well?  If the closest relative of rhodesiensis is Camposaurus arizonensis, there's actually two options, make rhodesiensis a species of Camposaurus as Camposaurus is an older name than Megapnosaurus, or classify both rhodesiensis and arizonensis as species of Coelophysis.  I get the impression some coelophysids are being over-spilt into different genera when they could really follow the example of Psittacosaurus having a number of species.

On the subject of Psittacosaurus, the only one of its species that to me seems quite different to the others is sibiricus.  I think though, Psittacosaurus being used as an example of whether to consider something as a new genus or not could work well for some types of dinosaurs, like some coelophysids or ceratopsids.