#365Insects 111: #Hemichaeta scutellata (Cresson, 1930) Today would have been German Dipterist and founder of modern phylogenetics Willi Hennig's 103rd birthday, and to celebrate, I thought I'd share a little story about how even great scientists make mistakes while they're starting out. In 1934, as an undergraduate research project, Hennig revised the family of flies that I specialize on, the #Micropezidae. In his earliest work, he drew attention to the uniqueness of this fly, putting it into a new subgenus he created for it & 3 other species. Unfortunately, being a young, green taxonomist, he failed to fulfill all the requirements to make a new name "official", and so it wasn't until another scientist came along 34 years later and finished the job that the name become official, and without Hennig's name attached. Through the course of my Master's research, it became apparent that this fly was unique enough to warrant a genus of its own, and so my advisor and I built off of Hennig's work, raising it up to stand on its own. Don't feel too bad for Hennig however; he would go on to (correctly) describe more than 50 genera and subgenera along with ~80 new species. (at University of Guelph)
