A replacement name for Dalodesmus sakalava

At the turn of the 20th century, Henri de Saussure and Leo Zehntner described a number of myriapod species collected in Madagascar, including two Polydesmus species with the species epithet sakalava. The first species was represented by fragments of a mature female collected by Franz Sikora in Madagascar. This species was illustrated in figure 22, plate 5 of de Saussure & Zehntner (1897) and labelled "Polydesmus sakalava". Publication of the accompanying text was delayed five years. In de Saussure & Zehntner (1902), the species was formally described as Polydesmus (Phymatodesmus) sakalava. The second species had meanwhile been described by de Saussure & Zehntner (1901) from a male collected on the Malagasy island of Nosy Be by Alfred Voeltzkow. It was named Pterodesmus sakalava within the new subgenus Polydesmus (Pterodesmus) de Saussure & Zehntner, 1901. The second species is a primary homonym of the first, following Article 57.2 of the International Code on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN 1999), i.e. there are two identical species-group names established for different nominal taxa originally combined with the same generic name. Under this Article of the Code the junior name is permanently invalid unless one of three conditions apply (Articles 57.2.1, 57.2.2, 57.2.3), none of which is applicable in this case. A further provision of the Code (Article 23.9.5) makes replacement of the junior homonym without application to the ICZN conditional on whether the names apply to taxa not considered congeneric after 1899. In this case both species were referred to Polydesmus after 1899, i.e. in 1901 when Polydesmus (Pterodesmus) sakalava was described. We therefore propose for the junior homonym the replacement species epithet voeltzkowi, after its collector. This species was transferred by de Saussure & Zehntner (1902) to the subgenus Tubercularium Attems, 1898, and to the new genus Eutubercularium by Brölemann (1916). In the most recent catalogue of Malagasy Polydesmida, Enghoff (2003) lists the species as Dalodesmus sakalava.