Talk:Falcarius

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

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 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)

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)

Titanic list of paratypes - too big?
The "History of Discussion" section contains an extraordinarily large list of paratype specimens, listing the name of each specimen. This is like nothing else I have seen in other articles and it strikes me as being unnecessary. How important is it that the name of each paratype is given? If this is not essential, then surely logically the list should be culled. What are the views of others? Zigongosaurus1138 (talk) 10:08, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
 * I personally would remove this list; this is just data that does not help with the understanding of the topic, and is not suitable for inclusion here per WP:What Wikipedia is not. Something like "In addition, a total of xx paratypes were assigned" should suffice. --Jens Lallensack (talk) 10:17, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Yeah, we probably only need to state the amount, and then at most we could say they were numbered UMNH VP 12283 to 15149 or similar. FunkMonk (talk) 10:55, 13 August 2020 (UTC)