Topic summary
Replacement name
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Nomen novum.
Zoology
New replacement names do not occur very frequently, but they are not extremely rare. About 1% of the currently used zoological names might be new replacement names. There are no exact statistics covering all animal groups. In 2,200 names of species and 350 names of genera in European non-marine molluscs, which might be a representative group of animals, 0.7% of the specific and 3.4% of the generic names were correctly established as new replacement names (and a further 0.7% of the specific and 1.7% of the generic names have incorrectly been regarded as new replacement names by some authors).