ABSTRACT
The case of the two Hawaiian bonefi shes illustrates one of the rules of taxonomic nomenclature, wherein the earliest species name linked to a museum specimen is the valid one. Since the discoveries of Shaklee and Tamaru (1981) and Pfeiler (1996), taxonomists have been sorting through species names in old literature to discover the proper nomenclature for Pacifi c bonefi shes. One of these is A. glossodonta (Forsskål, 1775), which seems to have a stable nomenclature. The other Hawaiian form, labeled A. neoguinaica (Valenciennes, 1847 in Cuvier and Valenciennes, 1847) for the past 25 years, was subsequently revised to A. forsteri (Bloch and Schneider, 1801) based on the nomenclatural rule of precedence (Randall and Bauchot, 1999), and recently revised to A. argentea (Forster in Bloch and Schneider, 1801; see Randall, 1995; Hidaka et al., submitted).
