Comments on the Taxonomic Status of Apodemus peninsulae, with Description of a

Jones, J. Knox, 1929-1992Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 2.5
Word count
20K words
Chapters
3

Tags

English Originals Natural Sciences East Asian SpeciesAnimal ClassificationBiogeographyScientific ObservationAcademic MonographAcademic StudyEmpirical AnalysisSpecimen StudyField NotesResearch Note

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Comments on the Taxonomic Status of Apodemus peninsulae, with Description of aAuthor: Jones, J. Knox, 1929-1992,Language: English, Class: QH: Science: Natural history, Release Date: Mar 17, 2010

Editor's review

This is a zoological paper discussing the taxonomic status of the Korean field mouse (Apodemus peninsulae) by J. Knox Jones, a twentieth-century mammalogy researcher, made public through Project Gutenberg. Its value lies not in length but in offering a primary scholarly slice of a specific species' taxonomic dispute: the paper argues around morphological characters and taxonomic placement and displays the methods and writing conventions of mid-twentieth-century mammal taxonomy. For today's readers it is both a historical document for understanding the taxonomic history of Apodemus and a sample for reading academic English and analysing paper structure. It is suited to specialist consultation and comparative research rather than general science popularisation. Note that the paper is old, and its taxonomic views and nomenclatural treatment may have been revised by later research; readers should treat it as material for the history of the discipline, not as a current taxonomic standard. The book has no popular illustrated layout and no background exposition for beginners; basic knowledge of animal taxonomy is advisable before reading.

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Reading tips

  1. Read the abstract and conclusion first to grasp the author's core claim on taxonomic status, then go back to the morphological evidence.
  2. As you read, list the taxonomic characters and scientific names used, noting which judgments may have been updated by later research.
  3. Read this alongside taxonomic literature on other species in the genus to understand the focus of the dispute and differences in argument.
  4. As a sample of academic English, excerpt its argumentative sentences and citation style for your own paper-writing practice.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3

FAQ

Does this paper still have taxonomic reference value today? It retains value as a historical document for tracing the evolution of taxonomic views on Apodemus and research methods. But the paper is old, and its specific taxonomic treatment may have been revised by later research; when citing it, check current taxonomic systems and the latest literature as well, and do not treat it directly as a current standard.
What background knowledge is needed before reading? It helps to know the basic ranks of animal taxonomy, the rules of binomial nomenclature, and common uses of morphological characters in classification. Familiarity with the family and genus divisions of rodents will also make the paper's argument easier to follow. Without this background, consult the relevant chapters of a taxonomy textbook first.
The text is in English—is it long? The book is a single academic paper in English of modest length, readable in one or two sittings. The language is specialist academic English with a high density of terminology, but the structure is clear. Non-native readers can use a dictionary to handle scientific names and anatomical terms first, then read the whole text.

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About the author

Jones, J. Knox, 1929-1992 Author

Jones, J. Knox (1929-1992) was a scholar of North American small mammals. Public biographical information about him is limited, and details such as his nationality are not recorded in the library's holdings. The library holds eight of his works, concentrated on the taxonomy, geographic distribution, and fossil records of rodents and bats, including Geographic Distribution of the Pocket Mouse, Perognathus fasciatus, Mammals of Northwestern South Dakota, and studies of harvest mice, yellow bats, and Pleistocene bats from San Josecito Cave in Mexico. These works are grounded in specimen and locality records, written concisely, and focused on taxonomic clarification and distributional verification, making them solid zoological studies that offer citable primary material on the fauna and classification of the relevant groups.