Talk:Falcarius utahensis

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is supported by WikiProject Dinosaurs, which aims to improve Wikipedia's coverage of dinosaurs. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page for more information.

This page was listed for deletion, the result was to keep, see Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Falcarius utahensis--nixie 08:04, 5 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Therizinosauridea vs. -ae

I guess I stand corrected. My mistake. --Whimemsz 20:00, May 7, 2005 (UTC)

Erm, but the page for the superfamily IS Therizinosauridae. So should that page be moved, or should we just change the link to [[Therizinosauridae|Therizinosauridea]]? --Whimemsz 20:23, May 7, 2005 (UTC)

Yes, all these suffixes are very confusing! Thank God I'm a cladist...;o). But nothing has to be changed: Therizinosauroidea is the name for the superfamily - and we'll need a separate article someday, though at the moment very little information can be given; Therizinosauridae is the name for the family - but NOT the family Falcarius belongs to (at least present analysis seems to indicate it doesn't). You see Kirkland, like almost all modern paleontologists, is a cladist too, so he has abstained from naming some redundant "family" of "Falcaridae" within the "superfamily" Therizinosauroidea. Modern paleontology doesn't use the concept of systematic ranks anymore, as it has no rational content. But most magazines still force you to use them as a condition for publication. Tradition has an enormous momentum. However Kirkland, or some other person, will probably sometime define a clade with Falcarius as definer; e.g. "all species descending from the most recent common ancestor of Falcarius and Therizinosaurus and more closer related to Falcarius than to Therizinosaurus". This clade might be given the name Falcaridae, suggesting it's a "family" - though it really isn't. It really is a clade, just like Therizinosauroidea and Therizinosauridae are really not a superfamily and family but function as clades. It's a big mess. Perhaps I'd better create the article Therizinosauroidea immediately :o)

--MWAK 07:06, 8 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Article Name Change

When I started this article -- in the heat of a new discovery -- I used the entire scientific name. Many other dinosaur articles use only the primary/more familiar name. What is the dino user concensus? Should we change this one to be consistant? WBardwin 23:05, 8 May 2005 (UTC)

Today it has become rare not to give each new species its own genus - so we should give the full binominal (thus including species name) immediately in the beginning of the article. That convention would also be very useful in preventing the species name from being completely left unmentioned - as happens far too often on wikipedia...:<( However it's best not to make it the article name, as people will search using the genus name only (and all new articles would have to be renamed to prevent the wiki's from becoming too long :o). IIRC this was decided by vote "long" ago.

--MWAK 09:29, 9 May 2005 (UTC)