In the mid-1950s, two distinguished Italian researchers, the mycologist Raffaele Ciferri (1895–1965) and the phytosociologist Ruggero Tomaselli (1920–1982), decided that a separate system of naming lichen mycobionts independent of the intact thalli was necessary. In this they were stimulated by the pioneering studies of Thomas (1939) in particular, which showed how different cultured isolated mycobionts appeared from whole lichen thalli. Thomas had already introduced separate names, ending in the suffix “-myces”, and they determined to introduce a comprehensive suite of generic names for lichen mycobionts in a series of papers (Tomaselli & Ciferri 1952; Ciferri & Tomaselli 1953, 1954, 1957). The numbers of generic names coined and validly published with Latin diagnoses were substantial: 15 in 1952, 203 in 1953, and a further nine in 1954. They made proposals to change the provisions of the Code, which then already ruled that names given to lichens were to be regarded as applying to their fungal components, but these were defeated and never adopted; this rule remains in the Code in Art. 13.1 (Greuter et al. 2000).