Tethysian, Tethyan or … Tethys Ocean and Tethys

Abstract

Tethys is a stand-alone modern noun, which does not require a qualifier in the English language. The use of the qualifiers Tethyan or Tethysian should be strongly discouraged. Taxa the names of which comprise the stem -tethy- are named after the Greek Goddess; those the names of which bear the stem -tethys- are named after the German (Suess, 1901), French (Suess, 1902) and English (Suess, 1908) Tethys Ocean. There was too much confusion on these two last points.