I'm no expert on this...
I am. :-)
but I thought that species could be transferred from genus to genus as knowledge advances.
As John pointed out, the epithet stays the same.
And presumably obvious spelling mistakes are corrected (contrast "FHTORA" in U+1D0C5), or are you saying that if the first publication had "Brontosuarus" as a typo this error would remain for ever?
There are errors and then there are errors. Some are correctable, some are not, and botanists and zoologists have different rules about this. An example that's not entirely OT: There was a Russian physician with the last name ÐÑÑÐÐÑ - a "cyrillicization" of his German family name Escholtz. His name was commonly written then and today in German form as Johann Friedrich Eschscholtz, the schsch reduplication being a reflection of the Cyrillic spelling. He Latinized (language, not alphabet) his name (a common occurrence among naturalists) to Eschscholzius.
He was physician to the Kotzebue expedition from Russia to (among other places) California; the ship's naturalist was Adelbert von Chamisso (author of _Peter Schlemiel_). Chamisso and Eschscholtz were fast friends (and some accounts imply that they were lovers). Chamisso named several new species of organisms for his friend, including the California poppy.
In the original description of the California poppy, he named it _Eschscholzia californica_, making the genus name the feminine form of Eschscholtz's Latinized name (this is a common occurrence). In the caption of the illustration of the plant, however, it was spelled _Eschholzia_. But for over a century afterwards, most botanists and horticulturists spelled the genus _Eschscholtzia_, assuming that both spellings in the original description were typographic errors.
But the rules of nomenclature are very specific about which types of errors can be corrected, and, since there is no obvious "correct" spelling of Escholtz, *the spelling that accompanied the original description must stand*, and the plant is correctly _Eschscholzia californica_.
-- Curtis Clark http://www.csupomona.edu/~jcclark/ Mockingbird Font Works http://www.mockfont.com/
