User:StevieWikks/sandbox

Article Evaluation
The Castoroides article contains a sufficient amount of information that pertain to the article topic. This includes Casteroides' physical description, taxonomic classification, and fossil discoveries. There appears to be no biases or over/underrepresented viewpoints. All of the links work and support the claims in the article. The only possible issue would be that a couple citations were duplicated, specifically 3 and 5 and 13 and 14. Editors in the talk page were discussing how articles about individual extinct species should be merged with extinct genus articles since there is very little information on the separate species of giant beaver. The article is also part of several wikiprojects such as: Paleontology, Rodents, Mammals, Canada, and United states. The topic is rated start-class, low throughout the majority of these projects with the exception of a mid-importance rating from the Palaeontology project.

Oxygen-16 Edit
Initially I went ahead and edited the oxygen-16 page without posting it in my sandbox but I've since removed any content I've added to the article so it can be reviewed here first. The article only has a brief definition of oxygen-16, its composition, formation, and origins but nothing about its applications in palaeoecology. So I'd like to copy content from the Oxygen 18 article section on palaeoecology since oxygen-16 and oxygen-18 are two sides of the same coin. I'm not sure if this would be considered plagiarism since its technically copying someone else's work even if its on wikipedia instead of an official source, so I'll notify the authors of the oxygen-18 section in the talk section before amending the article.

Paleoclimatology
In ice cores, mainly Arctic and Antarctic, the ratio of to 16O (known as δ) can be used to determine the temperature of precipitation through time. Assuming that atmospheric circulation and elevation has not changed significantly over the poles, the temperature of ice formation can be calculated as equilibrium fractionation between phases of water that is known for different temperatures. Water molecules are also subject to Rayleigh fractionation as atmospheric water moves from the equator pole-ward which results in progressive depletion of O-18, or lower δ values. In the 1950s, Harold Urey performed an experiment in which he mixed both normal water and water with oxygen-18 in a barrel, and then partially froze the barrel's contents.

The ratio O-18/O-16 can also be used to determine paleothermometry in certain types of fossils. The fossils in question have to show progressive growth in the animal or plant that the fossil represents. The fossil material used is generally calcite or aragonite, however oxygen isotope paleothermometry has also been done of phosphatic fossils using SHRIMP. For example, seasonal temperature variations may be determined from a single sea shell from a scallop. As the scallop grows, an extension is seen on the surface of the shell. Each growth band can be measured, and a calculation is used to determine the probable sea water temperature in comparison to each growth. The equation for this is:

$$T = A + B \cdot \left( \left( \delta {}^{18} \text{O} \right) \text{calcite} - \left( \delta {}^{18} \text{O} \right) \text{water} \right)$$

Where T is temperature in Celsius and A and B are constants.

For determination of ocean temperatures over geologic time, multiple fossils of the same species in different stratigraphic layers would be measured, and the difference between them would indicate long term changes.

Group Article Project
No-analog Communities

This article has 1 sentence and a few examples. For this article we would build out the whole article. Including overview, history of theory, strategies to overcome the issue, examples, prevalence through time periods/causes. Even if we couldn't add all of this, we would be able to add some much needed bulk to the article.

Quaternary extinction event

This article is about the Quaternary extinctions and and the multiple theories surrounding them. It is pretty biased towards the human caused extinctions theory and does not represent the climate change hypothesis very thoroughly. Given we’ve spent a moderate amount of time discussing this and have a number of relevant sources we could potentially improve these sections a lot. Other sections of the article need citing and areas that are back by opinion exist that need to be changed.

Late Pleistocene

This article is incredibly sparse, with and introduction and a brief discussion of bison in North America. The talk page also includes some discussion over terminology inaccuracies within the article. Firstly we would review the article for accuracy, and round out the citations. Then adding sections about characteristic flora and fauna, climate, extinction events, and transition to holocene.

Riverbluff Cave

This page describes Riverbluff cave, a site where multiple pleistocene fossils have been discovered. It has many dead references and gives a vague description of the species found in the cave. To fix it we would include functional citations, and a detailed list of species found in the the citations.

Oxygen-16

This is a stub article that defines oxygen-16 and the processes through which it is formed. It mentions nothing about its applications in palaeoecology while oxygen-18 mentions palaeoecology in great detail. We would draw a lot of information from the oxygen-18 page’s citations since oxygen-18 and oxygen-16 are two sides of the same coin and add paleoecology section to the article.

Port Kennedy Bone Cave edit
I added "beetle" before "genus of Dicaelus" in the second sentence. I did this to clarify that this genus belonged to a genus of beetles.

History
The fossils in the cave were investigated by noted 19th-century palaeontologists Edward Drinker Cope, Henry C. Mercer, and Charles M. Wheatley. Some of the fossils, such as an unnamed member of the Genus of Dicaelus are unique to this cave and have not been identified elsewhere.

Group Project: No-analog (ecology)
Aly, Matt and I decided to work on the No-analog (ecology) article stub. There are a number of different papers covering this subject, making it notable enough to promote to a full article. No-analog communities are