Authorship and date of five family-series nomina in Oligochaeta (Annelida): Lumbricidae, Naididae, Enchytraeidae, Tubificidae and Lumbriculidae

The International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (Anonymous 1999; ‘the Code’ below) provides Rules for the nomenclature of the ‘names of the group family’, or family-series nomina (Dubois 2000). These Rules have long been ignored or disregarded by some taxonomists, so that the authorship(s) and date(s) currently attached in the literature and in some taxonomic online databases to some family-series nomina of Annelida Oligochaeta[1] prove to be wrong according to the Code. For example, the database Taxonomicon credits the nomina Naididae to Ehrenberg (1828), Tubificidae to Vejdovský (1876), Enchytraeidae to Vejdovský (1879) and Lumbriculidae to Vejdovský (1884a). Vejdovský (1884b: 59) also claimed authorship for the nomen Lumbricidae. All of these attributions are incorrect, as will be established below through a chronological survey of the relevant works where these nomina were made available. [1]     The nomen Oligochaeta is here used in its original sense (Grube 1850), i.e. excluding the Hirudinea.