Okay for more context Malkani is a paleontologist with the Geological Survey of Pakistan. Since 2006 he’s been publishing dozens of new fossil taxa from Pakistan. Sounds good, right?
Then you actually read the papers and see the quality of remains:
This is supposed to represent four new dinosaur species.
As you can see, the taxa he names are not based on good material. At all. His thought process seems to be “I found new remains from X clade, it must represent a new species, therefore I must name it”, so he names literally everything he finds, diagnostic or not. Some taxa have diagnoses, others just don’t. The diagnoses, where present, are rudimentary and impossible to verify from the given figures, in part due to how horrendously low-resolution the figures are. From the figures, the fossils look nondiagnostic at best, or just look like rocks at worst.
This is the actual resolution and alignment of this figure in Malkani 2019, I shit you not. I’d ask how this got by the editor, but this was published in a journal whose publisher (SCIRP) is on Beall’s List of Predatory Journals and Publishers, so the editors probably didn’t give a shit.
The names he coins are generally not well-formed. A lot of species names end with -i, which is proper if it’s named for one person, but he also applies it to taxa named for multiple people (where the suffix should be -orum) or places (where it should be -ensis). Some names awkwardly incorporate words with no modification at all (e.g. my personal favorites Pakiring and Pakiwheel). He named a sauropod Gspsaurus (for the Geological Survey of Pakistan, not Gregory S. Paul), which I’m not even sure how it’s intended to be pronounced. He also named Balochisaurus malkani, with no given etymology for the species name, so I don’t know whether or not he named it for himself. To make things worse, it looks like he names the new families Pakisauridae and Balochisauridae in a 2006 paper, and then prioritizes them over the earlier-named Titanosauridae and Saltasauridae? You give me a better explanation for what’s going on here.
Malkani 2019 (”Recently Discovered Basilosaurid, Baluchithere Rhinoceros, Horses, Sea Cow, Proboscidean, Eucrocodile, Pterosaurs, Plesiosaur, Fishes, Invertebrates and Wood Fossils, Tracks and Trackways of Dinosaurs from Pakistan; Comparison of Recognized Four Titanosaur Taxa of Indo-Pakistan with Madagascar”. That’s one hell of a title) is the worst of the lot. It’s published in Open Journal of Geology, a predatory pay-to-publish open-access journal. He names nineteen new species in one fell swoop. Not a single one has a diagnosis or comparisons, an assigned holotype with museum number, or a sufficiently proper description - all violations of ICZN rules. He also claims Gomphotherium budzari is a new genus and species. Y’know, Gomphotherium Burmeister 1837.
The absolute worst is Mirkitakri haji. That the species name is malformed (it’s named after six guys named Haji, so it should be hajiorum) is the least of the problems here. Based on what’s allegedly a partial mandible, it’s considered a late Cretaceous horse. The specimen is considered a horse because.. the mandible is elongate. That’s it. Must be some horse, then, because it also allegedly has distinct angular and surangular as part of the lower jaw. For reference, in literally all mammals, the surangular is fused with the dentary, and the angular is derived into the ectotympanic bone in the middle ear. Of course, the provided figure just looks like an indeterminate chunk of… something.
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