I think I saw this a few times before I noticed what was happening.
I THINK, what is happening, is that if I have the taxon-edit pop-up window open, and I try to add a ‘preferred taxa’ entry there, if I have to create a new taxon-record, and use the ‘+’ feature (opens a new window to ‘add’ new taxon’), the text I typed in the taxon field (to search), is auto-populated in the ‘Author’ field (instead of taxon name).
Not a big deal if I pay attention, but ended up with a few weird ‘authors’ before I figure it out.