Well, I think you mean Boletus eastwoodiae (Be kind to Ms. Eastwood there…), but that is a different concern. That was a case that a really cool name (B. satanas, I mean cum’on everyone wants to use that name…), got used for a confused species, and eventually a actual good published species name got used after recent work was matched up with old names.
But that is not what is happening here, is that an observation that should be matched with other observations of P. stipticus of the eastern US, is now dumped into a wider bucket, because of a suggestion of a new species, but one which isn’t published, so this should go to a species observation that doesn’t exist?
I’m just trying to understand what should be done in these cases, or else we could drop perhaps, most? of the US observations back to generic levels and that would seem to create more confusion to sort out, instead of less. I mean I’m pretty sure I could find published siting of P. stipticus for the US, so I think we should be able to keep using that name as published, until someone publishes a new name to use. At least then we know which observations to change at that point. As what has been done for C. califorincus, B. rex-veris, M. fallax, and some others probably, I think just in the past year. These were sited as European species, until there existed a new name published for US observations.
Just dropping people back to generic identification because it isn’t European just doesn’t seem right, there are too many cases of that. Like there could be a argument that most US Russula species should just be R. sp. then, and I’m not sure that helps us listing all those obs. in that way.
