Falsifying Priority of Species Names: A Fraud of 1892

In 1891-92, N. H. Winchell and Charles Schuchert were preparing a chapter on Minnesota brachiopods for the Winchell Survey's Final Report on the geology of Minnesota. At the same time, C. W. Hall's Masters degree candidate. F. W. Sardeson, was finishing his thesis, which included some new names of brachiopods. Sardeson had told Schuchert that he would not publish first, but Hall required him to attempt to do so because some of Sardeson's species were from biozones described in a forthcoming paper of which Hall was senior author.

In order to beat Sardeson, Winchell had E. O. Ulrich prepare a short article on new brachiopod names for The American Geologist. A dummy preprint, dated 1 April 1892, was given to Sardeson on that date by Ulrich, who said that they had been mailed out. The article suppressed six of Sardeson's brachiopod names. At Hall's instigation, Sardeson's publication was mailed out on 6 April. Although the 1 April preprint had not been mailed out, a "corrected" preprint of the same, dated 21 April, was.

Sardeson's six species names are therefore still valid, although Winchell's trickery quickly prevailed in the literature. Hall used Sardeson to try to confound Winchell, whom he disliked greatly, but with Ulrich's help Winchell won out anyway.