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wastebasket taxa

wastebasket taxa is the plural of wastebasket taxon.

Meaning of wastebasket taxon

Noun

wastebasket taxon (plural wastebasket taxa)

  1. (informal) A taxon that exists only to classify organisms that do not fit anywhere else, being either paraphyletic or polyphyletic and therefore not considered valid under modern rules of taxonomy.
    • Extinct forms like Dimetrodon and Velociraptor are grouped with their living relatives. Therefore, the wastebasket taxon Reptilia is replaced by the clades Diapsida and Synapsida, and birds are classified as dinosaurs.2011, Matt Cartmill, Fred H. Smith, The Human Lineage, John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN

Questions about wastebasket taxa

What is wastebasket taxa the plural of?
Wastebasket taxa is the plural of wastebasket taxon.

Words near wastebasket taxa in the dictionary

  1. waste-ridden
  2. waste-time
  3. waste-water
  4. wasteable
  5. wastebasket
  6. wastebasket taxa
  7. wastebasket taxon
  8. wastebasketed
  9. wastebasketing
  10. wastebaskets
  11. wastebin

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: wastebasket taxa (page history and authors); wastebasket taxon (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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