Observation assigned to inactive taxon with same name as active taxon

General
1

I’m not sure whether this is a bug or not, so I’m posting it under General, but maybe it should be moved to Bugs?

I was just looking at what species in the genus Gopherus are found in California:

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=14&subview=map&taxon_id=40082&verifiable=any&view=species

and was surprised to see that there are two species listed as Gopherus agassizii, one active and one inactive.

Screen Shot 2026-01-01 at 6.37.14 PM
Screen Shot 2026-01-01 at 6.37.14 PM1920×801 320 KB

I was not aware that it was possible for an inactive taxon to be retained on an observation. My question is, is this supposed to be able to happen? I’m also confused by the two taxa having the same Latin name.

Thank you.

EDIT: I have a guess as to what happened. The Inactive G. agassizii was split into the active G. agassizii and G morafkai based on geography, and this one observation was accidentally left behind because it was not in the geographic area defined for either of the new taxa. Does that make sense?

2

the split happened in 2013 and all those observations are from iphone app after 2013, so my guess is the app had a bug and showed inactive taxon name which users picked.

and here you go it was indeed a bug in older ios app and lol this taxon was caught before too

just add new IDs i guess.

2 Likes