Talk:Hypsilophodont

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[edit] Monophyly of Hypsilophodontidae

The page http://www.taxonsearch.org/dev/taxon_edit.php?Action=View&tax_id=172 labels Hypsilophodontidae as active, based on the definition by Sereno (1998), which defines this family to include "all euornithopods closer to Hypsilophodon than to Parasaurolophus".

P. C. Sereno. 1998. A rationale for phylogenetic definitions, with application to the higher-level taxonomy of Dinosauria. Neues Jahrbuch für Geologie und Paläontologie, Abhandlungen 210(1):41-83.

[edit] Hexinlusaurus, a non-ornithopod ornithischian

Barrett et. al. (2005) showed Hexinlusaurus to be outside of Ornithopoda and placed it as Neornithischia incertae sedis. For this reason, remove Hexinlusaurus from this page.

Barrett, P.M., Butler, R. J., et Knoll, F. 2005. Small-bodied ornithischian dinosaurs from the Middle Jurassic of Sichuan, China. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 25:823-834.

[edit] Hypsilophodontidae

Why isn't the title Hypsilophodontidae?--MWAK 07:47, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

I don't think we have any guidelines about this--Wiki guidelines say all articles should use common names or as close as possible, and while most dino articles use the full scientific name, some don't (like Therizinosaur), especially some category names (like Cat:Tyrannosaurs). Dinoguy2 08:25, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

That, and there really isn't much of a Hypsilophodontidae as far as a monophyletic group goes, so the idiosyncracy comes in handy in this case. J. Spencer 14:23, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

But of what exactly would "hypsilophodont" be the common name? Not of a member of Hyspilophodontidae, for then the correct English form would be "hypsilophodontid". It would be the name for a member of Hypsilophodontia, a rather recent term that has been rarely used and has fallen completely out of favour now. Of course applying a vague concept can be very useful in science sometimes, but in an encyclopedia the poor resolution of basal Iguanodontia should not serve as an excuse to keep the paraphyletic ghost of a stillborn notion alive — especially as the vast majority of readers will be utterly confused about the exact status of such a notion. So perhaps we would best make it a guideline to use the scientific name in these cases :o). Another, minor, point is that the names of groups should be plural — even if the set has a known content of one...--MWAK 16:22, 15 August 2007 (UTC)