Form taxon (plural form taxa) is a biological term with two uses:
In general taxonomy, it is a kind of wastebasket taxon, either a taxon that is not a natural (monophyletic) group but united by shared plesiomorphies, or a presumably artificial group of organisms whose true relationships are not known, being obscured by ecomorphological similarity. Well-known form taxa of this kind include "ducks", "fish", "reptiles" and "worms".
In paleobotany, the term is occasionally substituted for the more correct term "organ taxon", meaning a group of fossils of a particular part of a plant, such as a leaf or seed, whose parent plant is not known because the fossils were preserved unattached to the parent plant.[1]
See also
Footnotes
- ^ Gee et al. (2003) 1133–1149
References
- Gee, Carole T.; Sander, P. Martin & Petzelberger, Bianka E.M. (2003): "A Miocene rodent nut cache in coastal dunes of the Lower Rhine Embayment, Germany." Palaeontology 46(6) doi:10.1046/j.0031-0239.2003.00337.x
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