Ungulate Taxonomy

Abstract

The team of Colin Groves and Peter Grubb (deceased) has published numerous papers on taxonomy together. This book is a collaborative effort to provide an up-to-date taxonomic treatment of the orders Artiodactyla and Perissodactyla. The book consists of detailed descriptions of each species and family of ungulate along with an introductory section detailing the authors' theory on taxonomy of ungulates.The authors have concentrated their discussion of each family to genera and species that occur naturally in the wild. Domesticated species are discussed briefly in the introductory chapter of Theory of Ungulate Taxonomy. For example, they list domestic swine as Sus domesticus, whereas others consider it Sus scrofa domesticus (Mayer and Brisbin 1991). The controversy over nomenclature for domestic “species” is reviewed in Mayer and Brisbin (1991) and Groves and Grubb have not elaborated or contributed to this discussion in this book. Instead they offer (p. 8) that “… the name given to wild populations of species takes precedence over those given to domesticates. Nonetheless, it is often convenient to continue to refer to domestic animals by their own scientific names, regardless of whether they might in fact, be of mixed (hybrid) origin.”