Whale bone

In Conservation DistList Instance: 9:20, after slightly misreading
Carol Brown's posting and not-so-slightly misreading an AAT entry, I
quite inappropriately assigned the query a subject heading "Baleen"
when it should have been "Whale bone". For those that wonder about
the factors that make for such unfortunate failures of vocabulary
control, suffice it to say that at the ungodly hour at which I
edited that DistList mailing (and indeed many mailings), it is not
difficult to be thrown off by a missing space, and all the proteins
look pretty much same before the morning coffee, so it becomes
damnably hard to distinguish keratin from collagen, much less
whalebone from whale bone. Now, abusing the power inherent in my
role as moderator, to alter the documentary record for all time, I
have changed the subject headings in the DistList archives to
reflect the proper terms.

Sally Shelton responds below, with an interesting and informative
discussion of the issue--a happy consequence, however unfortunate
the stimulus--, but I want to make sure everyone understands that
the author of the query was not responsible for the inappropriate
subject heading. I remain, your abashed moderator,

walter

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                  Conservation DistList Instance 9:21
                Distributed: Saturday, September 2, 1995
                        Message Id: cdl-9-21-002
                                  ***