My UW colleague Karen Strier, writing in a comment after a paper by Sayers and Lovejoy on the chimpanzee referent in paleoanthropology:
In behavioral studies, an anomalous individual may be identified as an outlier and excluded from statistical analyses so as not to obscure otherwise meaningful patterns. In taxonomy, an anomalous specimen is usually assigned a unique name, which it retains unless or until new discoveries or new analyses of existing material support its placement within the range of variation of another known form.
