The Chinese names of fossil plants: status, problems and suggestions

The Chinese names of fossil plants, namely Chinese translations of scientific names of fossil plants, play an import role in research and popular science of paleobotany and history of plant evolutionary biology in China. However, a number of con-fusions of Chinese names of fossil plants that occurred in the literature greatly hindered the dissemination and population of paleobotanical science due to lacking enough attention and a unified standard of Chinese names for fossil plants. Here, we summarize several issues of Chinese names of fossil plants, including synonym, tautonym, awkward-sounding, rarely-used Chinese characters, based on the data collected from Chinese paleobotany literature and textbooks. These issues and confu-sions reflect that it is urgent for a standardization of the Chinese names of fossil plants, and publish a dictionary and the cor-responding network query system of Chinese-Latin names for plant fossils. The purpose is not only to unify and standardize the Chinese names of fossil plants, but also to provide reference for the Chinese names of fossil animals.

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