Jim wrote:
....make sweeping changes to what appears to be standard practice elsewhere. ...
That begs the question since it has not been proven at all that capitalization of any organisms outside of the birds is standard. Many, many citations were given to support the down-style, however.
I would search for capitalised mammals, eg Gray Whale, and presumably not find them. ...
Our search is case-insensitive so Blue Whale and blue whale both return results for our article on blue whales (whatever the current capitalization).
Capitalization of this animal's common name is simply wrong since, as I have stated before, there is no international standards committee that has made special rules for naming mammals. Therefore we fall back to standard rules of English grammer and well-respected style guides for English. The great majority of these, as has already been proven, support the downstyle for the common names of organisms.
I do have to admit that I am intrigued by the proposition of distinguishing species names with capitals. But by own interest in doing so cannot ignore standard rules of grammar and the fact that outside of the birds common names are common nouns and therefore capitalization is spurious.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
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