A Return to Linnaeus’s Focus on Diagnosis, Not Description: The Use of DNA Characters in the Formal Naming of Species

Descriptions and diagnoses are alternative choices in all Codes of Nomenclature because Linnaeus relied on diagnoses, not descriptions, to name ca. 13,400 animals, plants, and fungi. A diagnosis names characters in which a new taxon differs from the most similar known taxon; a description mixes taxonomically informative and uninformative features, usually without indicating which is which. The first formal diagnoses of new taxa that included...