What is segregation and synonymy?
For some reason, mycologists tend to say that they’re splitting off new species from the old one, but segregating new genera. Go figure. A person who likes to split taxa is sometimes called a splitter. The opposite of a splitter is a lumper. A lumper likes to decide that two or more taxa are synonymous (that is, really the same thing) and lump them together under a single name. Back to top in the professional world Modern taxonomists have done a lot of lumping and splitting of 19th century (and older) taxa, mostly splitting of genera and lumping of species. We tend to lump the older species because 19th century (and older) mycologists often named a mushroom as new just because it was unusually large, or had an unusual color for that species, or had some other unusual developmental characteristic. There was another problem, too: many tropical and asian species were named by european mycologists ( Berkeley and Hennings come to mind) who had material brought to them by expeditions. Since
