Talk:Paleocene

AMK152's Geotimeboxes
AMK152 proposed in edits of 27 December 2006 a geotimebox for this article as follows:

I feel that the box information that is appropriate for the article is already in the footer, and that other extraneous information, such as previous eons, can be supplied where important, by links from the text. I removed the geotimebox and left the footer, pending discussion. --Bejnar 02:46, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

"brain to body mass ratios" clarification needed
I found an ambiguous statement that needs clarification for help with understanding the article.

Section 5.1 contains the statement about mammals:

"The brain to body mass ratios of these archaic mammals were quite low.[10]"

I would imagine that the statement has something to do with the size of the brain with respect to the rest of the body and how it relates to intelligence. I looked up "brain to body mass ratios" at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_to_body_mass_ratio but I did not find the mathematical definition of a "low ratio". I found things like 1:40 for humans and 1:150 for squirrels, but it did not state which one is a "low ratio" and which one is a "high ratio". I am thoroughly familiar with mathematics, with 1:40 yielding the number 0.025 and 1:150 yielding 0.0066667, but whether or not "a ratio" is low or high depends on whether it is the number or its inverse that describes the situation in question. Both are used to describe ratios and are exact opposites of each other.

For the purpose of the article it would be better to change the sentence in question to something like either: "With small brains in comparison to large body sizes, Paleocene mammals would seem to have had minimal intelligence" OR "With large brains in comparison to small body sizes, Paleocene mammals would seem to have had great intelligence".

Which one is it? Linstrum (talk) 03:54, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

Pre-review
I'm a bit busy in the next week, so I'm not going to start the review for real now (and possible never). At first glance the article looks like it can be a GA with a bit of extra work. The lede is somewhat technical and you could decide to not use the words niche, pectomorphs and maybe even flora per WP:EXPLAINLEAD. The exact timing of stages is probably not sufficiently important and bit 'scary' for lay people to feature twice in the lede (in table and in first paragraph).

As continental drift is an important factor in determining climate, I'd put the section geology before climate. The climate section might need some expansion as well (says the climatologist), or at least the second paragraph might need to lose its summation to improve readability. If RSs support it as being important for this specific epoch, you could add as one of the explanations for a warm Antarctica the fact that the Drake_Passage was still closed. Femke Nijsse (talk) 10:37, 10 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Fixed the lead, added a mention of Antarctica in Paleogeography, any other additions you can think of for the Climate section?  User:Dunkleosteus77 &#124;push to talk 01:32, 11 September 2019 (UTC)

Earliest placentals and marsupials?
The article claims that the earliest Theria stem from the Paleocene but the source cited, Grossnickle, D. M.; Newham, E. (2016). "Therian mammals experience an ecomorphological radiation during the Late Cretaceous and selective extinction at the K–Pg boundary". Proceedings of the Royal Society B. 283 (1832): 20160256, obviously states precisely the opposite. --MWAK (talk) 21:43, 8 January 2020 (UTC)
 * No, this article says that the first placentals and marsupials stem from the Paleocene (not therians as a group), and in fact clarifies "therian mammals had probably already begun to diversify around 10 to 20 mya before the extinction event"  User:Dunkleosteus77 &#124;push to talk 01:42, 24 March 2020 (UTC)


 * Ah, I assumed that "placentals" was here used as a vague term indicating Eutheria and likewise "marsupials" indicated Metatheria. If the crown groups are meant, this had better been made explicit.--MWAK (talk) 08:43, 24 March 2020 (UTC)