Talk:Edmontosaurus annectens

Orphaned references in Edmontosaurus annectens
I check pages listed in Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting to try to fix reference errors. One of the things I do is look for content for orphaned references in wikilinked articles. I have found content for some of Edmontosaurus annectens's orphans, the problem is that I found more than one version. I can't determine which (if any) is correct for this article, so I am asking for a sentient editor to look it over and copy the correct ref content into this article.

Reference named "KD94": From Thescelosaurus:  From Triceratops:  

Reference named "DBWetal04": From Edmontosaurus:  From Maastrichtian: Weishampel et al. (2004) 

I apologize if any of the above are effectively identical; I am just a simple computer program, so I can't determine whether minor differences are significant or not. AnomieBOT ⚡ 13:14, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

So Anatotitan is Edmontosaurus?
I'm going to miss that dino, I grew up with that one scene from Walking with Dinosaurs where the T.rex shakes the life out of one. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.36.130.109 (talk) 13:57, 9 March 2012 (UTC)
 * The dino still exists, it just has a different name ;) MMartyniuk (talk) 15:11, 10 March 2012 (UTC)

Merge with Edmontosaurus?
Now that Anatotitan is considered to be a synonym of Edmontosaurus, it seems a little strange to give Edmontosaurus annectens it's own page. 50.195.51.9 (talk) 15:16, 31 August 2012 (UTC)
 * I disagree. The main reason almost all of the dinosaur-level articles are at the genus level instead of species is because almost all genera have only one species (or a couple of poorly studied species, or one really well-known species and some fragmentary species), so a species article for, say Coelurus fragilis or Hypsilophodon foxii would be redundant with genus-level articles on Coelurus or Hypsilophodon. Edmontosaurus annectens, under its previous guises as Claosaurus annectens/Diclonius mirabilis.../Anatotitan copei has accumulated a great deal of research, the results of which cannot be strictly applied to just the genus Edmontosaurus. As we accumulate more information on other dinosaurs, it will probably eventually make sense to have articles on some other species as well (or, cynically, we can just wait for someone to split them into their own genera, which seems to be the tenor of the times). J. Spencer (talk) 02:09, 1 September 2012 (UTC)
 * Could you provide me with a couple examples of articles split up by genus instead of species? Triceratops horridus and Triceratops prorsus are on the same page, but even if my argument doesn't hold up, the page could maybe use some revising as it still seems to be written as if Edmontosaurus annectens is still Anatotitan and not a species of Edmontosaurus. 50.195.51.9 (talk) 18:19, 4 September 2012 (UTC)


 * Isn't there a chance of Anatosaurus longiceps being resurrected, with E. annectens as a junior synonym? Why isn't longiceps the valid species name, if it is oldest? FunkMonk (talk) 21:49, 29 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Same reason a lot of old names that have priority get ignored... cultural inertia. But yes, I'd say there's a very good chance Anatosaurus will start seeing more use in the future for this species. Though it should be Thespesius ;) MMartyniuk (talk) 12:54, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
 * I also think it may be time to revisit the idea of forcing all dinosaur articles to end at the genus. There's growing recognition among paleontologists that differences between species actually matter, and it would be nice to reflect this on Wikipedia. E. annectens and E. regalis are very different animals, certainly just as different as Parasaurolophus and Charonosaurus, to pick a random example. Rather than continue to merge and un-merge these things as the whims of various researchers change, why not just make our lives easier and split up all species into individual articles? MMartyniuk (talk) 12:58, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
 * I think splitting could work on an individual basis, as in if someone wanted to start a longer article about a Diplodocus species, their article shouldn't be merged by someone else, and it should be allowed to grow. On the other hand, I don't think it should mean we should just start churning out stubs about every dinosaur species. I'd support species articles if it it was quality over quantity, since every well known genus is already covered, and the FAs and other long articles we have can't expand forever! So if the genus article itself is already a stub, I think splitting it should wait until there was enough information to split, so we don't end up with two one line stubs. FunkMonk (talk) 20:03, 30 January 2013 (UTC) FunkMonk (talk) 19:54, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Oh yeah, absolutely. In fact I remember back when we were trying to get articles on every genus I was simply covering "stubby" genera at the family level for a while. The content should be there to justify it, as it is here. MMartyniuk (talk) 20:13, 31 January 2013 (UTC)
 * I agree it would be better to focus on species since they occasionally jump around from genus to genus and what applies to one spieces doesn't apply to another. A downside of splitting is that if there is research that treats a particular dinosaur at the genus level then there will be a lot of repeated info in species articles. It also drasticly increases work load by having yet more articles to watch over. Maybe a way around this is to only have genus articles but each one has subsections for each spieces, each section is treated like an article. Kind of like this: User:Steveoc 86/sandbox. If the species moves or becomes a new genus it could be draged and droped into another article with minimal alteration needed. However considering the length and detail in the Edmontosaurus articlces I'm not sure that they would suit this format. Steveoc 86 (talk) 11:26, 2 February 2013 (UTC)
 * It could be simpler than that, if a paper treats only the genus level, leave that information at the genus article. If an article discusses a specific species, use that at the species level. A lot of generic articles already deal with the issue of repeated info from higher taxa. "Like other theropods, x was a bipedal carnivore..." MMartyniuk (talk) 23:06, 2 February 2013 (UTC)


 * On these two articles specifically, it seems the Edmontosaurus article will have to be hugely cut down if E. annectens becomes Anatosaurus annectens. But that's maybe not a bad thing, considering how long that article already is. But this one would become much longer instead... FunkMonk (talk) 17:20, 19 February 2013 (UTC)