I am happy to announce that we have a new paper out investigating the validity of species vs. genus taxonomy in the hominid fossil record.
A genotype:phenotype approach to testing taxonomic hypotheses in hominids (Brasil et al. 2020)
We note that genus-level taxonomy is much more informative in the fossil record, particularly when using biologically-meaningful phenotypes. This work uses our previously described dental phenotypes (MMC and PMM; Hlusko et al. 2016) and was led by Dr. Marianne Brasil. This research continues to build on our findings that MMC and PMM are heritable, independent of body size and sex, and have strong phylogenetic signal in mammals (Hlusko et al. 2016, Monson et al. 2019, Zuercher et al. 2020). This is the second application of these dental phenotypes to the hominid fossil record, following previous work from my lab that used machine learning to assess dental evolution in the fossil record (Monson et al. 2018). Research on MMC and PMM is ongoing. But for now, enjoy this paper on the biological philosophy of taxonomy in the fossil record! 