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Anatomical humanocentrism on Wikipedia

I've noticed a serious trend toward humanocentrism in Wikipedia's articles on anatomical subjects. For example, many articles on various bones describe only (or primarily) "X" in H. sapiens. Hey Wikipedia, other critters have bones, too, you know. Take a look at Skull, for example. How about Femur? Pelvis? Vertebral column? Metatarsal? I think we're seeing a definite pattern here. If Wikipedia does have dino-relevant articles on these things, they sure aren't easy to find by looking for them.
Theoretically, we need to add a lot of content to Wikipedia on this stuff. As it stands, it's even arguably wrong to link the name of any given bone to an article with almost no relevant content. We should probably start a WikiProject or just a "project", along with the various other zoological WikiProjects, to create this content, or to make it more obvious where it currently exists but is hidden. Thanks for listening. -- Writtenonsand (talk) 11:27, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

Good point - There is Category:Dinosaur anatomy, but the actual articles you mention don't have any info other than on humans. It's good to take a stand; maybe you're the man to bring the site up to speed? Everyone needs to take charge once in a while and this may well be your calling. Go forth warrior of wikipedia and attack! ;) Erm, yeah, gladiator speech over... :) Spawn Man (talk) 00:35, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

Name that thecodont!

We have an article Thecodont on the "thecodonts". Well and good. The article has a photo of a rather formidable critter, labelled a "thecodont", which in life would be five or more meters long. Does anybody have a clue what that is? -- Writtenonsand (talk) 14:12, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

It's a Paleorrota thing, so User:Sergiokkaminski would be the person to ask; unfortunately, he hasn't edited in several weeks. J. Spencer (talk) 15:09, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
Righto. Asked him (and I see that he stopped by today.) -- Writtenonsand (talk) 22:42, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

More informations about The thecodont. He was colected in the Candelaria City (see map in paleorrota). He has more or less five meters, was a big animal. the name is Karamuru vorax . The people of UFRGS colected this animal. He lived at triassic.
I colected 5 dinossour and 3 dicynodonts. I work with the people of UFRGS and UFSM.
See this page *Dinosaurs of Rio grande do Sul. and see de karamuru vorax. Have a move and pictures.

If you need more informations. Please contact. Sorry my english!!!

Sergiokkaminski (talk) 2:49, 6 January 2008 (UTC)

Thank you for the information, Sergiokkaminski! Can anyone start a stub article about Karamuru / Karamuru vorax? Apparently in the Rauisuchia, according to [1]. Here are the Google hits [2]. -- Writtenonsand (talk) 19:36, 7 January 2008 (UTC)
Kudos and thanks to User:J. Spencer for quickly creating this. -- Writtenonsand (talk) 04:20, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

Chicxulub Crater is set to be on the Main Page on the 8th

Uh, well, what the heading says, just so you know. :) J. Spencer (talk) 02:06, 6 January 2008 (UTC)

It's on now - someone might want to watch it for vandalism... Spawn Man (talk) 00:36, 8 January 2008 (UTC)
Duly added. cheers, Casliber (talk · contribs) 01:22, 8 January 2008 (UTC)


Ultrasauros -> Supersaurus: Merge?

Yo, dino dudes and dudettes --
We have an article Ultrasauros which begins with "The dinosaur genus originally known as Ultrasauros is now officially designated Supersaurus. Please see that article for more information."
Assuming that this is true, don't we just want to merge the info in Ultrasauros into Supersaurus and make a redirect. Yes? No? What's the scoop here? -- Writtenonsand (talk) 19:29, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

I think I'm on record in favor of merging articles on widely accepted junior synonyms into their senior synonyms (Brontosaurus -> Apatosaurus, Ultrasauros -> Supersaurus, Seismosaurus -> Diplodocus), with sub-sections on their famous alternate names/identifications. I'd support this if other people have changed their minds :) Dinoguy2 (talk) 20:45, 8 January 2008 (UTC)
I was bold and merged the two articles. Entire paragraphs were identical in both articles, so there really isn't much of a loss by merging them together. There is a sudden disjoint between the second and third paragraph (the article suddenly goes from talking about Supersaurus to talking about Ultrasauros), but this was already present in the original Supersaurus article. Firsfron of Ronchester 22:53, 8 January 2008 (UTC)


Article George Olshevsky could use some cleanup

The article George Olshevsky could use some cleanup (I've done some but would appreciate it if others would take a look):

  • Has an extremely brief stub about George Olshevsky, followed by several paragraphs about the Birds Came First hypothesis.
  • Seems to contain some personal opinion / speculation / original research.
  • Could use copyediting for general readability and for comprehensibility. (We might expect non-paleontologists interested in bird origins to access this article.)
  • Has some external links, one reference, and one actual cite.

-- Writtenonsand (talk) 00:32, 9 January 2008 (UTC)


Really big continent categories! Please allow me to diffuse!

Wow. Just look at Category: Dinosaurs of Asia. Don't you think it would be helpful to create more specific categories, such as Category: Dinosaurs of China? I would have gotten busy on this myself, but I didn't know if there was some sort of consensus behind the current categorization scheme. I think having categories for individual countries would be cool. Abyssal leviathin (talk) 02:11, 12 January 2008 (UTC)

The geographical categories are meant to describe where the dinosaurs lived during the Mesozoic and are meant to go along with a chronological category (ie, Category: Cretaceous dinosaurs, which by the way, is a much, much bigger category than Dinosaurs of Asia). They weren't meant to identify which country the fossils were found in because those countries didn't exist in the Mesozoic. Asia is a big continent though so I could see maybe "Dinosaurs of Southeast Asia", "Dinosaurs of Central Asia", "Dinosaurs of East Asia" or something to that effect if there was consensus. Sheep81 (talk) 02:18, 12 January 2008 (UTC)
Here is the original discussion from 2006. Sheep81 (talk) 02:32, 12 January 2008 (UTC)
Please no "Dinosaurs in Country X" categories. These countries didn't exist in the Mesozoic. There has been consensus on this for almost two years. Firsfron of Ronchester 02:52, 12 January 2008 (UTC)
I get where you're coming from, but I'm still going to have to disagree. I mean, a continent is a big place and such a general category is almost useless. Countries may not have meant much to Tyrannosaurus rex, but neither did Wikipedia. To Homo sapiens both are significant, and I propose we recognize this by merging the concepts and splitting the continent-level categories.
I strongly urge splitting these continent-level categories down to the national level, or even down to states and provinces (or making list pages for those latter ones, since that would be a mess). I mean, as a Dinosaur nut myself, I know I'd love to have a centralized place to see all the dinos of my home country or state, and I'm sure lots of Wikipedia's users would as well. Lists would be good for very specific locales, but come on, at least split the categories down to the country level. I don't think it's reasonable to expect readers to wade through hundreds and hundreds of articles.
On a related note I would definitely definitely support splitting Period-level chronological dinosaur categories at least down to the epoch level (Late Cretaceous, Early Jurassic, etc.). Seriously. Gigantic categories are a pain for the readers. I mean, don't you guys get frustrated by gigantic categories yourselves? I don't have much patience for them, personally.
Abyssal leviathin (talk) 03:12, 12 January 2008 (UTC)
Many dinosaurs (hundreds, in fact) aren't known well enough to categorize down to the Epoch level, meaning we'd have hundreds in specific Epoch categories and hundreds of others in general Period categories, and possibly some in both. It sounds like a huge mess, with the reader unable to navigate through the categories easily (because some articles would be in the general Period categories, while others would be in the specific Epoch categories). The locations of many dinosaurs are also generalized, and can't always be pinned down to categories. Finally, WP:DINO editors decided a long time ago to avoid the sorts of problems that Category:Dinosaurs of Vermont and Category:Dinosaurs of Moldova would create: these types of categories would usually only contain one, possibly two dinosaurs, and would necessitate the creation of hundreds of new categories, all vulnerable to vandalism. Since the project has very few active members already, adding several hundred pages to our already overloaded watchlists doesn't make sense to me. Let's keep it simple if possible, by not adding hundreds of tiny categories. Eight location categories are probably enough, when also considering the two dozen classification categories and the three time categories, and various non-dinosaurian categories. Firsfron of Ronchester 03:30, 12 January 2008 (UTC)
Why don't you just make articles like List of Chinese dinosaurs or List of dinosaurs from Queensland or List of dinosaurs from northeastern Uintah County? Then we can stick those articles in the appropriate category. Sheep81 (talk) 03:58, 12 January 2008 (UTC)
Argh! I was posting that suggestion, and you made me have an edit conflict and I lost the post. But, um, yeah, I support that proposition. Abyssal leviathin (talk) 03:59, 12 January 2008 (UTC)
Don't remove anything from any existing "gigantic" categories. Making many sub-category listings is always a huge project. These projects are almost always started by one person who's concerned about the issue. They begin work with great energy, and make great progress for a while. Then after a couple of weeks or months something comes up so that they can't continue, and we're left with perhaps 25% "created" items and 75% "need to be created" that no one else feels like tackling. So please leave the existing functionality intact, and create redundant sub-categories if desired. (If everything goes very well and all the sub-categories eventually get created fine, then it will be painless to delete the "gigantic" categories at that point if desired.) -- Writtenonsand (talk) 16:15, 12 January 2008 (UTC)
Right, except there is no consensus to use country categorisation in the first place. Mgiganteus1 (talk) 17:00, 12 January 2008 (UTC)
I thought we already agreed to just use list pages for that purpose? Abyssal leviathin (talk) 09:46, 19 January 2008 (UTC)

Tyrant topic update

We are moving pretty close to a featurable tyrannosaurid topic here. Tarbosaurus and Alioramus are now GA, and the rest of the genera are FA. Personally I think Tarbosaurus could move on to FAC if there is any desire to go that direction. The major priority for this little side project is now getting Tyrannosauridae itself up to snuff. I've almost completed the article in my sandbox, just need to write the dreaded paleobiology section (doesn't sound like much but there is lots of stuff to add there). Sheep81 (talk) 20:27, 12 January 2008 (UTC)

Wait... I need to write half the description section, the phylogeny section, and go thru and cite everything I wrote... never mind, not as close as I thought. Sheep81 (talk) 20:28, 12 January 2008 (UTC)
Be great to get Tarby to FAC, and Gorgy too...cheers, Casliber (talk · contribs) 21:19, 12 January 2008 (UTC)

Okay I posted everything I wrote for Tyrannosauridae so far (it's up to 24K), the only major parts left are adding pictures and the paleobiology section, which I have been putting off because it promises to be massive. Feel free to contribute there if you want, and I'll work on it as I can... a lot of it will probably be pretty close to what's already in the paleobio sections in the various FAs. I'll spiff up Gorgy when I can too so we can get it to FAC also (no reason it should be left out of the FAC party!). Sheep81 (talk) 02:33, 15 January 2008 (UTC)

Great, I have one or two things on my plate but I'll see what I can do. cheers, Casliber (talk · contribs) 02:47, 15 January 2008 (UTC)
I've had a bit of a once-over over Tarbosaurus and I feel it's ready to roll really. Anyone else? cheers, Casliber (talk · contribs) 19:44, 18 January 2008 (UTC)
I won't be around much this weekend and I'm working a lot next week but I'll stop in when possible if you send it. Sheep81 (talk) 07:21, 19 January 2008 (UTC)
OK, I'll wait for Firs or someone to drop in and we'll go, or maybe just nom in 48 hours if no-one does drop in. You get first dibs on nominating Sheepy as it is a class job. cheers, Casliber (talk · contribs) 09:28, 19 January 2008 (UTC)
I'm in. Sorry, very busy week at work. Firsfron of Ronchester 05:45, 21 January 2008 (UTC)
I've got the day off magically so I decided to FAC the article. I'll be around all day to respond to reviewers. Sheep81 (talk) 20:28, 23 January 2008 (UTC)
On the off chance anyone didn't notice, Tarbosaurus is featured now! Way to go team! What's next? Sheep81 (talk) 01:56, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

Lambrecht (1933)

I have a copy of Lambrecht's Handbuch der Palaeornithologie at hand. If there's anything I can look up for you, leave me a msg! Dysmorodrepanis (talk) 20:44, 19 January 2008 (UTC)

Hi

How can I help? I created Fernando Novas. --Paleofreak (talk) 15:17, 24 January 2008 (UTC)

Welcome! Take your pick really- what do you like doing? If you like collaborating we have collaborations - Tarbosaurus is at FAC at the moment, and the current one being workd up is Origin of birds, while the last, Pachycephalosaurus didn't get alot of work done on it. cheers, Casliber (talk · contribs) 19:09, 24 January 2008 (UTC)


Article redirects -> Species

Araucanoraptor redirects to Neuquenraptor, but Neuquenraptor doesn't mention Araucanoraptor. I know a little about biology and dinosaurs, but I'm brought up short in situations like this, "Wait a second -- Is Araucanoraptor Neuquenraptor or isn't it?" I suspect that other people less familiar with these matters might be even more confused.
Therefore, may I suggest a guideline or convention of our WikiProject that such redirects should always mention the synonymous taxa somewhere in the article, so that people understand the relationship between "Name A" and "Name B". Your thoughts on this welcome! -- Writtenonsand (talk) 16:22, 25 January 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, this has come up before... I think most of us try to include synonyms but we haven't gotten to all 1000-whatever pages yet! Good point though Sheep81 (talk) 03:11, 26 January 2008 (UTC)
Absolutely. Another thing to get 'round to...cheers, Casliber (talk · contribs) 03:14, 26 January 2008 (UTC)
I keep having conversations of this sort on different Wikipedia topics.
Please. Everybody. General Wikipedia guideline: It's much easier to include cross-references, cites, etc, when you create the content (redirect, whatever), than for people to have to go back later and try to figure out what's the right thing to do.
Thanks loads. :-) -- Writtenonsand (talk) 05:17, 26 January 2008 (UTC)
Well dude, not much we can do about that now. Our first priority when the project started was to just create all the articles, only later did we come up with standards. :) Sheep81 (talk) 07:49, 26 January 2008 (UTC)
Nothing very unusual about that. :-) -- Writtenonsand (talk) 17:18, 26 January 2008 (UTC)

Apatosaurus. Brontosaurus. Two-for-One Special!

We have an article on Apatosaurus. We also have a separate article on Brontosaurus. This seems really odd to me.
There's some discussion of this at Talk:Apatosaurus from Feb of 2006. I think that a re-discussion would be appropriate. -- Writtenonsand (talk) 16:29, 25 January 2008 (UTC)

I am in two minds about it. The main criterion for me would be the length of Apatosaurus once polished up for FAC. If it was around 30-40kb I'd think about adding it in, if substantially bigger then not. This might be a good project then..hmmm. Can we leave it and make an effort to make Apatosaurus comprehensive and then make a decision?cheers, Casliber (talk · contribs) 19:31, 25 January 2008 (UTC)
"I am in two minds about it." -- Hmm, I hope you haven't been hanging around the dinosaurs too long... :-) -- Writtenonsand (talk) 05:23, 26 January 2008 (UTC)
Hahaha, cool!! Sheep81 (talk) 19:16, 26 January 2008 (UTC)
One thing to consider is that Brontosaurus consists of only one usable section, some of which is repeated in Apatosaurus already. The rest is a pop culture dumping ground. Apatosaurus doesn't even have a pop culture section, and anything that went into one would surely be about Brontosaurus anyway... Dinoguy2 (talk) 23:16, 25 January 2008 (UTC)
Well that makes it nice and neat..like two jigsaw peices of a puzzle....cheers, Casliber (talk · contribs) 03:15, 26 January 2008 (UTC)
Given that the FA Diplodocus is only 34 kb, I'd be inclined to merge, presuming Apatosaurus would be of a similar size. cheers, Casliber (talk · contribs) 03:17, 26 January 2008 (UTC)

Is the Seismosaurus-Diplodocus situation completely resolved? If so then yeah, I think we usually merge synonyms where they are clearly synonyms. Sheep81 (talk) 16:49, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

I think the synonymy of Seismo and Diplo is pretty much universally accepted. I haven't seen a paper treating them seperately in ages. Also, for what it's worth, the merging of well-known sauropod synonyms has already been done to Ultrasauros/Supersaurus. Dinoguy2 (talk) 20:04, 30 January 2008 (UTC)
Cool, I just don't read much sauropod literature so I didn't know one way or the other. Sheep81 (talk) 21:14, 30 January 2008 (UTC)


General comment: In general across the project, we should presumably lump or split in accordance with whatever is the best current thinking at the time -- and then re-split or -lump if it should prove advisable later. :-) -- Writtenonsand (talk) 18:24, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

For the most part, that's what we've been doing. Several articles either started out as redirects and got spun off as separate articles, or vice versa. There may have even been a few that went back to their original condition. Firsfron of Ronchester 21:42, 31 January 2008 (UTC)
Righto. :-) -- Writtenonsand (talk) 22:52, 31 January 2008 (UTC)
I would have merged Seismosaurus myself but was a little perssed for time and wanted to think about what information should go where beforehand. Apatosaurus I thought would be better polished up toward FAC-type material for comprehensiveness before seeing if it could accommodate under the size limits (It probably can). I am not sure if anyone still opposes either. cheers, Casliber (talk · contribs) 22:23, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

Reminder of the Philip Greenspun Illustration project

Hi. You may be familiar with the Philip Greenspun Illustration Project. $20,000 has been donated to pay for the creation of high quality diagrams for Wikipedia and its sister projects.

Requests are currently being taken at m:Philip Greenspun illustration project/Requests and input from members of this project would be very welcome. If you can think of any diagrams (not photos or maps) that would be useful then I encourage you to suggest them at this page. If there is any free content material that would assist in drawing the diagram then it would be great if you could list that, too.

If there are any related (or unrelated) WikiProjects you think might have some suggestions then please pass this request over. Thanks. --Cherry blossom tree 16:51, 29 January 2008 (UTC)

New collaboration

Well, Origin of birds went down like a lead balloon. Never mind, Herrerasaurus is the new collaboration, which isn't a bad thing as this must be within sight of the finish line...let's see if we can tip it over....cheers, Casliber (talk · contribs) 03:14, 1 February 2008 (UTC)


Can anyone help with thalattosaurs?

Since they aren't really dinosaurs, I'm not sure if I should ask here or at Amphibians and Reptiles. Currently we have a stub article of about six sentences at Thalattosauridae, a single sentence at Nectosaurus, and nothing at all on Thalattosaurus. I've started a Thalattosaurus article here; can anyone contribute? - Posted by Vultur 4 February 2008. - Sig added by Writtenonsand (talk) 05:24, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

FYI there's a WikiProject Sea Monsters "devoted to mantaining and adding new articles on aquatic prehistoric animals." I've taken the liberty of boldly re-posting your request to that project's Talk page. Hope this helps. -- Writtenonsand (talk) 05:27, 5 February 2008 (UTC)
Thanks! Vultur (talk) 01:43, 6 February 2008 (UTC)

Seismosaurus now merged into Diplodocus

OK, I have merged these two. Funny, looking back at Diplodocus it could do with a bit of a cleanup. Still needs to be massaged a bit and the text fully integrated nicely. Anyone is welcome to chip incheers, Casliber (talk · contribs) 22:31, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

Give the dino collaboration a rest for a few months?

Dear all, things have gone a bit quiet and folks (me included) are working on a few other things, so shall we put the collaboration on hold for a bit (say till April or something)? cheers, Casliber (talk · contribs) 04:33, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

I suppose. J. Spencer (talk) 01:49, 20 February 2008 (UTC)
...actually, we'll leave it going this month as you've nominated it and see if your zeal inspires anyone to help or tag along.... :) Casliber (talk · contribs) 05:24, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

[citation needed]

Anybody willing to look up for that ugly tag in Suchomimus? Circeus (talk) 05:08, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

Hi there. I recently updated 16 articles so they appear in Category:FA-Class dinosaurs articles. I guess you all know how to update the project tags in future, so I'll just say nice work on the articles! Carcharoth (talk) 01:20, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

I've taken the liberty of updating Template:WikiProject Dinosaurs to allow article to be assessed as FL-Class (featured lists), and I've created the corresponding category at Category:FL-Class dinosaurs articles. Is there any project documentation on what the standards are for a featured list? Something like Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Assessment? Carcharoth (talk) 12:18, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
Not specifically for here other than the general information at WP:FL or WP:FLC...Casliber (talk · contribs) 19:39, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

Paleobiology and Paleoecology

Hi everyone. In spanish wikipedia, an user is reclaim me that Paleoecology must be inside Paleobiology. I always divided this sections according to the dinosaur articles here. But I saw the article Paleobiology and clearly it includes Paleoecology as subdiscipline. What do you say? Dropzink (talk) 20:16, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

I've been splitting them for length, putting all of the topics that are external to the dinosaur (formation/environment) with Paleoecology, and all of the topics that are intrinsic to the dinosaur (gait/feeding/growth/interesting head gear) in Paleobiology. J. Spencer (talk) 22:54, 4 March 2008 (UTC)
Same here. Sheep81 (talk) 07:18, 5 March 2008 (UTC)
Sounds good to me. Casliber (talk · contribs) 09:22, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Bone Sharps, Cowboys, and Thunder Lizards

I was going through WP:FAC and I came across Bone Sharps, Cowboys, and Thunder Lizards, a graphic novel detailing a fictionalized account of the Bone Wars. Pretty interesting, eh? Nishkid64 (Make articles, not love) 07:36, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

Yes. Please comment if you have time to review, since the last time I nom'd it it failed due to a lack of reviews, opposes or otherwise. Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs (talk) 00:50, 17 March 2008 (UTC)

Iren dabasu formation

Hi, I just redirected Iren Dabasu Formation to Erenhot, as this is the name of the next town and the article already contains some words on dinosaurs. Just wanted to let you know lest someone thinks the blue link leads to an actual article. Regards, Yaan (talk) 21:20, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

Mikko's Phylogeny Archive

Mikko's Phylogeny Archive has moved to http://www.helsinki.fi/~mhaaramo; unfortunately, Archosauria seems to be out. J. Spencer (talk) 15:22, 16 March 2008 (UTC)


smallest non-avian theropods

Could somebody please add a note to Theropoda#The_largest_and_smallest_theropods on the smallest known non-avian theropods? Thanks. -- Writtenonsand (talk) 08:02, 22 March 2008 (UTC)

Permian–Triassic extinction event

I'm having a bit of a problem with an editor that you all know so well. He can be quite tendentious, but digging through his edits I cannot tell what's good and what's not. I was wondering if I could get some help from all of you very intelligent, and knowledgeable editors on dino-stuff. Except for User:Casliber. He's into fungi, and I don't trust him. OrangeMarlin Talk• Contributions 22:55, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Have you attempted to resolve your disagreements by discussion with this person? Philcha (talk) 00:27, 7 June 2008 (UTC)

Update!! as of early April 2008 CE

Alright folks, the new collaboration is Spinosaurus, some folks actually voted which I am very pleased about as I was considering packing the Collaboration away in the wiki-cupboard for the autumn. For any who aren't fussed about that one, there's Petey above, which'd be great to see at FAC too, and Gorgosaurus. (Where is Sheepy anyway?)

Right, Seismosaurus was merged into Diplodocus by yours truly some time back so some massaging there may be in order.

Anyway, where I am the pages are taking forerver to load and I have to run off for a bit so will update collab templates yada yada yada later....Cheers, Casliber (talk · contribs) 00:06, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

Category:Featured dinosaurs

Hello, folks. This is to let you know that I have nominated Category:Featured dinosaurs for deletion. You can find my rationale and the deletion debate here. Please stop by. :) — Dulcem (talk) 00:03, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Joining

Can I join? I have been on for more than 4 days now, I know a lot about dinosaurs(more than my entire school ;) ) and other prehistoric creatures. So what do you think? -Walkingwith08 (talk) 18:55, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

Hello, Walkingwith08. If you want to do this the formal way, we've got this page :). At the moment, we have an open list of tasks, a list of things to do over at the portal page, and an article put up for collaboration (Spinosaurus). Thanks for dropping by, and don't hesitate to ask questions! J. Spencer (talk) 02:18, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

Gorgosaurus at FAC

OK folks, after it was sitting so close to FAC for so long I copyedited Gorgosaurus and discussed with Sheepy who was happy for it to be nominated. Drop in and comment. Cheers, Casliber (talk · contribs) 09:46, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

And Gorgosaurus wins! J. Spencer (talk) 03:15, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

Unnamed/undescribed specimens?

Just wanted to express some concern over the use of separate articles for unnamed specimens. In the past, we'd been talking about individual specimens on the page for the corresponding genus unless they're especially notable (e.g. Sue). In some cases, individual specimens are based on juveniles or eggs etc., and can't be assigned to a genus. For example, the tiny dino eggs from Thailand are discussed on Microraptor and Epidendrosaurus, two dinosaurs mentioned in the paper as similar in size to the unknown animal that laid them. However, it's things like IGM 100 972 that make me think we should have a policy on this. In this case, we've got juvi skulls of an unknown troodont that was not named by the authors (as it would likely be a nomen dubium). The article consists of one paragraph and two refs and repeats some info already present at Troodontidae. Maybe the best way to deal with these unnamable juvenile/egg specimens would be to discuss them in full in a paleobiology section in the article for the highest taxon to which they can be assigned?

For other, diagnostic material this gets a little trickier. SPS 100/44 was described over 20 years ago but not named. Etiquette would suggest Barsbold should be the one to name it, so it may still have a name coming (along with "Ingenia"? A man can dream...). In this case, I think the article should stay, as it's basically the same as any other dino article, just sans name. Though you could argue the same for a number of other specimens which don't get this treatment (like "Angloposeidon").

WDC DML 001 is another case altogether. This is an undescribed specimen which has been mentioned in an abstract and will be getting full publication in the near future. Isn't it jumping the gun to already have an article for it? What if some joker comes in here and edits the article to name it? It's a long shot but you're risking issues of embargo and taxonomic priority here. At least shouldn't someone check with Hartman to see if he's ok with this? Dinoguy2 (talk) 03:32, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

I sympathise, tho it may be difficult to draw up a policy for isolated and incompletely understood specimens - each new specimen might well require new rules. I also don't see how the policy would be operated. Does it require a new kind of bureaucrat?
Re the specimens Dinoguy2 listed:
  • I agree that IGM 100 972 should be in a paleobiology section in the article for the most detailed taxon to which they can be assigned, ideally genus.
  • Re SPS 100/44, I'd suggest such specimens should generally in a list of "unnamed specimens of _taxon X_", in the article about _taxon X_ if not too many, otherwise in an article "unnamed specimens of _taxon X_" to which the article about _taxon X_ links. The fact that SPS 100/44 is unnamed almost guarantees that there's not a lot to say about it, because its discoverer / describer would have named it if the fossil had provided enough information.
    I've had a look at similar cases in paleoanthropology to see how such problems are handled in these articles. The separate articles about the hominid skulls KNM ER 1813, KNM ER 1805 and OH 24 add nothing to the info presented in Homo habilis. But I'm not sure they should be under Homo habilis as Homo habilis provides no refs to show a scientific consensus that they belong there. There's also no separate article about KNM-ER 1470, which IIRC has been the subject of debate for decades. If such cases came up in dinosaurs I'd advocate a separate "unassigned specimens" article in which the debates could be tracked until they reached a conclusion, then specimens that were assigned could be moved to appropriate articles.
  • As Dinoguy2 said, WDC DML 001 is jumping the gun. I'm not a deletionist in general, but I would be happy to see WDC DML 001 deleted. Philcha (talk) 11:21, 21 April 2008 (UTC)
I would very much like to avoid articles on unpublished stuff (for one thing, the very fact that it's unpublished means we aren't relying on primary literature for sources... even if the info is from a thesis or something, it hasn't been officially published... plus we definitely DO NOT want to be the first published source on anything). Unnamed specimens that have been described in published literature to some extent are a slightly different story, but I still think they would be better off included in a family/genus type article rather than having their own article. Often the published information on these unnamed specimens is outdated or incomplete as well. Sheep81 (talk) 08:24, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
Especially since people are starting to cull info from Wiki to publish as books, like in the recent example from Germany. For all I know we may have already officially published WDC DML 001. Whoops, sorry Scott! Do we attribute it to Wikipedia, 2008? ;) Dinoguy2 (talk) 00:07, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

We'd have to name it to have published WDC DML 001, and there are probably a few other things we'd need to fulfill, so that's not the first thing I'd be concerned about. I'd be more concerned about embargoes. It's probably not in play for WDC, since it was at SVP, had an abstract, and has been mentioned in other articles (in the NMMNH Morrison volume of 2006, for example), but I don't know about every case. I'd prefer to be tighter on nomina nuda. I've never been happy with "Alshanosaurus" and buddies, even if they are perhaps the worst-kept secret in the history of paleontology, and I specifically held back on creating Dollodon and Dakotadon articles (or even adding them to the list of dinosaurs) until the paper actually came out. J. Spencer (talk) 03:21, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

Birds. WikiProject Dinosaurs.

(If this was previously discussed, please direct us to archive. Thanks.)
Should the template {{WikiProject Dinosaurs}} be added to Talk:Bird? -- Writtenonsand (talk) 22:54, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

I think we can agree to allow paraphyly in this case, hey? Wikipeojects are broken up to allow people to work on specific areas, and speaking for myself, I can't be bothered to patrol the hundreds (thousands?) of bird pages... Another way to look at it, should we add Wikiproject Fish templates to the dinosaur pages? ;) Dinoguy2 (talk) 00:41, 29 April 2008 (UTC)
Heh. :-D -- Writtenonsand (talk) 16:09, 29 April 2008 (UTC)
I wouldn't add the tag, but I wouldn't revert it if someone else added it. J. Spencer (talk) 03:21, 29 April 2008 (UTC)
Those damnable bird types might, though. They dislike dinosaurs and ruthlessly push an anti-dino POV on the Bird article. :P Sabine's Sunbird talk 03:27, 29 April 2008 (UTC)
That's sarcasm right? I think a little paranoia over us dino types trying to change every instance of the word "bird" to "avian feathersaurus rex iz teh awesomez my cladogram sez so!" is justified ;) Dinoguy2 (talk) 13:19, 29 April 2008 (UTC)
Yeah, but I do ornithischians.  :) J. Spencer (talk) 04:48, 29 April 2008 (UTC)
Coming soon to a T-shirt near you! :-D -- Writtenonsand (talk) 16:09, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

Theropod Database

The Theropod Database is out again; most recent working Internet Archive version is here. J. Spencer (talk) 01:56, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

(actually, a yet more recent version is here, but he updated so rarely anyway; not all pages are present in the same versions, so preview and check around). J. Spencer (talk) 03:25, 29 April 2008 (UTC)
While we're at it, the Graveyard also is out (replaced by one of those inane generico commercial sites). External links = this for the Graveyard (mostly pterosaurs), and this for The Theropod Database. J. Spencer (talk) 02:51, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

Retiring the Collaboration for a few months?

Hey folks, we haven't seen much action with collaborations for a bit. How do we feel about putting it in recess for a few months, till July or something and we can maybe revive it when people are a bit recharged maybe? Thoughts? Cheers, Casliber (talk · contribs) 05:50, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

I'd hate to see the collaboration go away, as that was one of the nice things about the project. Work duties have kept me offline, but I hope to find some time to work on Spino this week. Firsfron of Ronchester 08:33, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

Cretaceous North America

What is the name of the sea that divided North America in the Late Cretaceous? I'm working on the Nichollsia article and want to tell the reader what it is doing in the middle of Alberta. I searched "map of the cretaceous world" on Yahoo! and came up with a map for some game, which called it the Vermillion Sea, but then I realized that they may have made up names for the purpose of the game's map. Bob the Wikipedian, the Tree of Life WikiDragon (talk) 14:43, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

It' usually called the Western Interior Seaway. Dinoguy2 (talk) 07:30, 11 May 2008 (UTC)
Yep, almost always, with "Cretaceous Interior Seaway" a distant second. Sheep81 (talk) 00:46, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

Bałtów Jurassic Park

Stegosaurus in popular culture has an IMHO pretty nice model of a Stegosaurus from "Bałtów Jurassic Park", which as you can see is a redlink. Searching for "Bałtów" gives a disamb page with two places named "Bałtów", both of which are currently redlinks.
I have a vague recollection that I've seen another photo or two from this park on Wikipedia, but can't track down where. The photo's caption gives a link to the park's website at http://baltowskipark.pl/ (English pages indexed at http://baltowskipark.pl/index_en.php ), and the other models they have are also IMHO not bad at all.
So, to finally get to my point -

  • Should we make an article on this place?
  • Do we have / Should we make a list of "dinosaur parks"?

-- Writtenonsand (talk) 06:38, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

Cenozoic 2

What does Cenozoic 2 mean? Or 3? Here's the page where I found them: http://flatpebble.nceas.ucsb.edu/cgi-bin/bridge.pl?action=displayCollResults&collection_list=16533,16616,16669,16677,16681,16682,16697,16702,16705,16706,16707,16709,16710,16711,16713,16714,16715,16716,16718,16719,16737,16738,16745,16746,16747,16748,16751,16752,17039

Thanks, Bob the Wikipedian (talk) 18:54, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

I don't know offhand, but the NALMAs (North American Land Mammal Ages) given, like Uintan, (these should really be articles at some point) are solidly within the Cenozoic. J. Spencer (talk) 23:49, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
It looks like that database uses 1-5 to specify which part of the Cenozoic they are referring to. Bob the Wikipedian (talk) 12:23, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

Charles R. Knight

According to a discussion currently on the DML, artwork by Knight is still copyrighted by his estate and will not go into public domain until 2023. I've noticed a few Knight pics around the dino pages, but these should be removed as unfree images. Dinoguy2 (talk) 23:52, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

  • Hmmm, could you post the discussion? They may claim copyright, but in America, anything published before 1923 is in the public domain, and there's not much to do about it, see Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp. I doubt the guys on Commons will agree to delete it, they recently had a similar case where someone claimed copyright on PD stuff, which they denied: [5] Funkynusayri (talk) 03:04, 14 May 2008 (UTC)
Knight's stuff was originally published before 1923 but has since been published in numerous sources, would this possibly affect the copyright status? Knight's estate seems to offer his works for licensing, which would be pointless if they were free and clear public domain. Dinoguy2 (talk) 04:25, 14 May 2008 (UTC)
Even if the material was copyright-renewed, the images are in the public domain if first published before 1923. Firsfron of Ronchester 04:34, 14 May 2008 (UTC)
It doesn't matter if it is republished, but some of Knight's work was apparently first published after 1923, so we should of course keep from uploading that stuff. Only images where it is certain that they were published before 1923 have been uploaded, as far as I know. Funkynusayri (talk) 04:53, 14 May 2008 (UTC)
I thought images on Wikipedia should be uploaded assuming they are legal for everyone to use-- which would mean that these images should not be uploaded. Bob the Wikipedian (talk) 12:24, 14 May 2008 (UTC)
What do you mean? If they are in the public domain due to age (as these are), they are free for any use. Funkynusayri (talk) 14:48, 14 May 2008 (UTC)
Never mind...I misread the discussion. Bob the Wikipedian (talk) 20:08, 14 May 2008 (UTC)
I think my confusion came from the fact that they're citing death of the author + 70 years, which as you said does not apply before 1923 (Knight died in 1953). Dinoguy2 (talk) 00:22, 15 May 2008 (UTC)
Knight is ours! Funkynusayri (talk) 11:18, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

Hi., i am wondering why the dinosaurs FA level article and the various FAs of dinosaur species haven't been nominated for FEATURED TOPIC? I can't think of any topic (except probably the Solar System) having more featured content. Just a thought --192.8.222.82 (talk) 10:54, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

Hello. The idea has come up, but we'd need a lot more FAs and GAs because of the number of dinosaur articles. A possible subgroup, though, would be the tyrannosaurids, which are getting closer. J. Spencer (talk) 01:06, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

cross-posted from Ichabodcraniosaurus

Can anybody provide reliable sources for Ichabodcraniosaurus? The third link is dead, and the other two go to a mailing list. Corvus cornixtalk 21:28, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

J. Spencer (talk) 01:05, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

The original source appears to be Novacek, M. (1996). Dinosaurs of the Flaming Cliffs, Anchor Books. According to this post. Dinoguy2 (talk) 23:32, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

Flickr

Just wanted to point out that Flickr is a great search engine for dino images, just search through either of these two links, and there are hundreds, if not thousands, of images which can be freely uploaded to Commons and used here:

Images with CC Attribution-ShareAlike licenses: http://flickr.com/creativecommons/by-sa-2.0/

Images with CC Attribution licenses: http://flickr.com/creativecommons/by-2.0/

Search for specific genus names, or just "dinosaur". Many images sadly don't have descriptions.

Funkynusayri (talk) 18:22, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

It looks like a great resource, Funky. You've really done a great job finding images for the articles. However, I just did a search for by-sa-2.0 dinosaurs beginning with the letter Z, and got no results. It seems like only the more well-established dinosaurs would appear on Flickr. And recently, I've noticed that some of our articles are being overcrowded with images (up to four or so on very short stubs). When the text can hardly be read because there are so many images cluttering the page, I think we should expand the articles before adding any more images to them. A prime example is Huayangosaurus, which looked like this until a few hours ago (it still needs work, but at least the text isn't secondary now). Your image work is greatly appreciated, but if you see articles where you're adding quite a few images (or many images have already been added to the article) could you leave a note here or somewhere so that we'll know these articles should be expanded? While we're on the subject of images: Dinoguy once made the proposal that fossil images should take precedence over artist's impressions in the taxobox, and I think it makes sense. What's your opinion? Firsfron of Ronchester 21:26, 26 May 2008 (UTC)
Yeah, sure isn't complete, but there's a lot of stuff. Also, each license search has different results, so it can be a good idea to search for the same name on each. And I've noticed the overcrowding, which mostly happens on articles about dinosaurs that are popular, but do not necessarily have much text. The best thing would be to have all the images ready on Commons, so they can be added when these articles are expanded, but many times the photographers just upload their images directly to Wikipedia, and add them to articles (as was the case with the current Huayangosaurus taxobox-image, I've done a great deal of moving-to-Commons lately). If these images are removed from the articles, they tend to get lost, and will probably never be found again, so maybe it would be good to have temporary galleries on especially crowded, short pages?
As for fossils and correctly mounted skeletons in taxoboxes, makes sense to me, so if it becomes "policy", should we start switching images around? Funkynusayri (talk) 21:39, 26 May 2008 (UTC)
I agree that temporary galleries would be better than losing the images. But it really only takes an hour or so to expand most articles to the point where the images aren't overpowering the page (unless there are many images, like on Protoceratops). About a mounted skeleton in the taxobox "policy": I think it has to be used with a grain of salt: like you said, they need to be correctly mounted: IMO, it's better to have an accurate artist's depiction than a mounted skeleton in an outdated pose (like what we've done with Massospondylus). Firsfron of Ronchester 21:49, 26 May 2008 (UTC)
  • So we should maybe add something like this?:

By the way, I have to "admit" that as a kid, I had an obsession with cutting out dinosaur images from various magazines and similar and making my own "books" by gluing them on paper and then having my mother write stuff about the dinosaurs on them, so Wikipedia is a perfect place to carry on with that, so if I become too obsessive with the image adding, please whack me out of the trance! Funkynusayri (talk) 22:08, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

I'm not a big fan of maintenance tags on articles. There's no easy way to tell which articles have been so tagged. Personally, I prefer lists: when we had the list of missing dinosaur articles, it was very easy to tell which articles needed creating. Similarly, WP:DABS tells us which articles are too short. The maintenance tags... to me, they just look tacky: the readers can see them, and it's just one more graphic added to an article already overloaded with graphics. As far as adding "too many" images... well, I don't think that's really the problem: it's the size of the articles that is the problem, IMO. Once the size of the articles is brought up to a decent size, it won't matter if there are quite a few images on them. That's my take, at least. Don't quit doing what you're doing! They say a picture's worth a thousand words... now we just need the thousand words to help balance out the images! ;) Firsfron of Ronchester 22:18, 26 May 2008 (UTC)
The "correctly mounted" caveat is why I haven't pushed that proposal very much. Good luck finding many correctly mounted dino skeletons (example: That Huayangosaurus mount has it's thagomizer spikes oriented vertically, which is unlikely given evidence from relatives. So does the illustration actually...). But if we do have photos that match current thinking on dino posture and anatomy, by all means these should be used in place of an artists impression. I suppose we should apply the same standards of image use to mount photos as to illustrations. After all, a mount is basically just an artists impression that happens to use some of the original material. It's like a 3D skeletal diagram. Dinoguy2 (talk) 23:48, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

Bob the Wikipedian (talk) 19:31, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

I'm not so sure any artistic impressions are better than a correct skeleton mount. The first and last are artist's impressions of the subject, whereas the middle is a photo of the subject itself, with the pose being the only speculative part. If people can't imagine how it would be in life, that's kinda sad, but it is our job to imagine it for them? When you get down to it, the drawing is a product of imagination informed by educated guesswork. The skeleton is the subject itself, no imaginary elements present. Personally, I think the best way to represent a fossil species is by showing... the fossil. ;) Dinoguy2 (talk) 00:59, 28 May 2008 (UTC)
  • Maybe skull images (if available, and if it is fully known) should be preferred over full skeletons in taxoboxes, since the possibility of inaccuracy due to wrong postures will be eliminated that way? FunkMonk (talk) 05:13, 13 June 2008 (UTC)
But that won't avoid inaccurate jugals, bad skull reconstructions, and forehead horns. Even the heads can be reconstructed incorrectly. Firsfron of Ronchester 05:42, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

"extinct genus"

Mark t young and I have been having a discussion about the use of this phrase in the lead sentence of articles. The example has been "Kryptops is an extinct genus of abelisaur". I think that "extinct" is not necessary for a member of a completely extinct group, and that it can be misleading because it may imply that there are abelisaurid genera that are not extinct; Mark disagrees, but he can tell you in his own words about it :) . Anyway, we thought we'd better put it up to the rest of you. Thoughts? J. Spencer (talk) 00:00, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

I don't feel that saying A is extinct implies that B is not. No implication is made, although the reader may infer any number of things; hard to predict what the reader will infer. A good portion of our readers will be children anyway (judging from the vandalism we get), children who really do need to be reminded that these animals are extinct. Even though it may seem like overkill to state that this abelisaur is extinct, a good portion of our readers will never have heard of an abelisaur. Firsfron of Ronchester 02:30, 2 June 2008 (UTC)
The other thing, of course, being that out of a thousand or so genus articles, only fifteen or so have the "extinct genus" formulation. J. Spencer (talk) 03:05, 2 June 2008 (UTC)
Do they all really need to match? Sure, each one should have a taxobox, some lovely illustrations, and have basically the same format, but let's not go all "cookie-cutter" and insist that they all need the word "extinct" or must not have the word "extinct" in the lead. There's lot to be said for standardizing the articles to some extent, but this is just a single word. (Yes, I understand the irony of me being the editor to say articles shouldn't be "cookie-cuttered" when I'm the one who created cookie-cutter stubs for a few hundred of them... ;) Firsfron of Ronchester 03:16, 2 June 2008 (UTC)
Seems to me that we're entitled to assume that users should know that all non-avian dinosaurs are extinct. We can't explain everything in every article.
Let's let the "characteristic characteristics" of each taxon go in the top article for that taxon. I.e. Dinosaur (rightly) specifies that all non-avian dinosaurs are extinct, and then all "daughter" articles on dinosaur taxa "inherit" this. -- Writtenonsand (talk) 03:22, 2 June 2008 (UTC)
Sorry for not getting to this earlier, the project wasn't on my watchlist. I started adding extinct as there is some articles (mostly not pterosaurs or dinosaurs) that begin "extinct genus". Either way is fine by me, but I thought some consensus might be nice. But like firsfron said, there is no need to standardise articles too much. Anyway, can I assume we have decided not to standardise and leave it up to individual editors discresion? Mark t young (talk) 16:55, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

Crukhosaurus

I am not convinced the above article, entirely unsourced, is legitimate. Would someone with some background in the field be able to take a look at it and let me know what they think. Cheers, Mattinbgn\talk 22:07, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for spotting this Mattinbgn. The article is bogus, there's no such dinosaur. A google search turns up two hits, both to the article. Needs to be deleted. Dinoguy2 (talk) 23:11, 2 June 2008 (UTC)
And done. Thanks Dinoguy2, Mattinbgn\talk 23:21, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

Clean-up listing

...Can now be found at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Dinosaurs/Cleanup_listing. It includes all the dinosaur articles tagged as needing clean-up, references, NPOV, etc. 3.86% of our articles are so tagged (which is quite small, compared to other WikiProjects), but among them are some big names (Apatosaurus and Archaeopteryx, for example). Firsfron of Ronchester 14:11, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

Just finished refs for Apatosaurus and Archaeopteryx, and removed a bit on Camarasaurus. Firsfron of Ronchester 19:47, 8 June 2008 (UTC)

Generic vs. common names

Can generic names be written as lowercase, unitalicised common names? See discussion at Talk:Jurassic Park (film)#Dinosaur_names. Mgiganteus1 (talk) 20:59, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

Peer Review: Museum of the Rockies

Hi! I was directed this way when I asked bibliomanic15 if s/he'd weigh in on Museum of the Rockies. While I realise the museum covers more then dinosaurs, the article's focus is currently the paleontological collection because it's the most well-documented.I've requested a peer review of the article and would appreciate any feedback you may have. I'm also off to tag the article for the project, which I was unaware of prior to now. Thanks! TravellingCarithe Busy Bee 03:47, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

Commercial use of museum photos?

My google-foo is failing me here--is it kosher to post photos taken in museums, particularly of models, under CC attribution licenses that allow commercial use, without consent of the museum/sculptors who created/own the original? There are a lot of these photos on wiki including my own, and somebody contacted me about using my photo of the AMNH Microraptor model in a book. Something seems off about me granting such permission, so I directed him to contact the AMNH directly. But all images on Wiki should be cleared for commercial use without necessarily contacting the uploader. So what's the scoop? Dinoguy2 (talk) 23:16, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

And I don't know the answer... But can you copyright a skeleton, for example? I would doubt it. FunkMonk (talk) 04:24, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

Well that's tricky, as museum mounts are basically sculptures that happen to contain dome percentage of real fossil material. The fossils themselves are the property of the museum, too--just look at the hooplah about who had permission to study which specimens in AetoGate. Still, I'm sure you'd get more leeway with a skeleton than with a model or sculpture. Dinoguy2 (talk) 04:44, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
We are talking about several different issues, here. Let's not confuse them. First, let's address the museum sculpture issue: is it okay to take photos of sculptures in museums and upload them under CC attribution licenses? This came up during Archaeopteryx's FAC. The answer is: it varies by country. The Commons page has a list of countries where "freedom of panorama" for sculptures applies: Australia, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Portugal, the UK, Canada, Hong Kong, India, Israel, and Singapore allow sculptures to be photographed and distributed. The U.S. and Denmark specifically exclude sculptures from their "freedom of panorama" clauses.
The skeletal mounts are an entirely different issue. Firsfron of Ronchester 05:24, 21 June 2008 (UTC)
There is something about a "threshold of originality" which might help with the mounted skeletons with "fictional" elements at least, I don't understand it completely. (talk) 06:09, 21 June 2008 (UTC)
  • An admin on Commons said skeletons are ok, but sculptures are not. What do we do, ignore it for now? There might come an unexpected tag-attack some day... FunkMonk (talk) 15:42, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
Sculptures are ok, as long as they were in the 11 countries listed above. Thus, our images of Archaeopteryx and Utahraptor (taken in the UK) are fine. The Danmark models are problematic. We can't ignore them if they're not kosher. Firsfron of Ronchester 04:24, 24 June 2008 (UTC)
Doesn't freedom of panorama only apply to objects in public view? Many museums are privately owned, not owned/controlled by the government. Or could I take photos of a Mickey Mouse sculpture in Hong Kong Disneyland, put it on a coffee mug, and sell it outside the gates, without infringing any copyrights? Are there special exclusions for educational institutions? Dinoguy2 (talk) 06:50, 24 June 2008 (UTC)
Never mind, page says "In other countries, these restrictions are sometimes less stringent. For instance, the Austrian, British, Mexican and Indian law allows taking pictures of publicly accessible interiors." At any rate, I'll nominate my own photos of sculptures for deletion. Dinoguy2 (talk) 06:52, 24 June 2008 (UTC)
Yeh, seems like that's the way to do it, there are a lot of pictures of dinosaur sculptures taken in the US too on Commons, so it should maybe be brought up there that a mass deletion is needed... FunkMonk (talk) 08:27, 24 June 2008 (UTC)
  • I sent an email to one of the museums, Experimentarium, and the campaign manager said that the images taken there can be used as long as Experimentarium is credited. I'm now waiting for a reply from the other museum. FunkMonk (talk) 10:39, 24 June 2008 (UTC)
They understand that this means unlimited commercial and noncommercial use without any further consent, yeah? Dinoguy2 (talk) 11:36, 24 June 2008 (UTC)
Hmmm, I thought so after he said all that was required was attribution, but I just sent him this link to a license to see what he thinks: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
You could maybe ask the museums you took your pictures in too, Dinoguy? FunkMonk (talk) 14:58, 24 June 2008 (UTC)
A lot of mine were from the AMNH, has Jbrougham been around lately? Dinoguy2 (talk) 03:03, 25 June 2008 (UTC)
Jbrougham was active six days ago. Might be worth e-mailing him. Firsfron of Ronchester 04:42, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

WikiProject Palaeontology

Hi everyone,

A new WikiProject, Palaeontology has been set up, and aims to be the umbrella project uniting Dinos, pterosaurs and monsters from the deep, alongside all the other palaeo article out there that aren't under a strict wikiproject. It was only set up today, so support, opinions and/or criticism is needed. I have come around to this idea, as there are a large number of articles out there in dire need of work, and this would be an excellent way to bring in some collaborative editing. Cheers guys and dolls, Mark t young (talk) 15:32, 30 June 2008 (UTC)

Maybe we should put extinct mammals like Paraceratherium, and Mammuthus sungari under it as well. ScienceApe (talk) 22:47, 17 July 2008 (UTC)
If it's an umbrella project, why are dinosaur articles getting a separate project banner on the talk page? Dinoguy2 (talk) 23:38, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

Mispelled paleontologist

If someone has a chance, please move Phillip J. Currie to Philip J. Currie. The redirect at the new name has been edited, so it requires an admin. Probably easier to verify the correct spelling here, and the requested move page is backlogged. Pat (talk) 03:16, 3 July 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, Firsfron. Pat (talk) 03:21, 3 July 2008 (UTC)
Hi Pat! (Welcome back, BTW). The page has been moved over the redirect. Thanks for spotting the error. Firsfron of Ronchester 03:22, 3 July 2008 (UTC)
Thank you. Though all I have to do to become invisible again is unplug the router, like I had to do two days ago :). But I probably won't be around much. Losing the ability to move pages wasn't a big deal, and there are ways around the prohibition on creating pages, but the endlessly expanding list of semi-protected pages is frustrating. Pat 04:36, 3 July 2008 (UTC)
There are still several thousand paleo-articles which aren't under semi-protection, though. Thousands more than those under protection. Well, anyway, it was good to see you around. :) Firsfron of Ronchester 06:37, 3 July 2008 (UTC)

Changes to the WP:1.0 assessment scheme

As you may have heard, we at the Wikipedia 1.0 Editorial Team recently made some changes to the assessment scale, including the addition of a new level. The new description is available at WP:ASSESS.

  • The new C-Class represents articles that are beyond the basic Start-Class, but which need additional references or cleanup to meet the standards for B-Class.
  • The criteria for B-Class have been tightened up with the addition of a rubric, and are now more in line with the stricter standards already used at some projects.
  • A-Class article reviews will now need more than one person, as described here.

Each WikiProject should already have a new C-Class category at Category:C-Class_articles. If your project elects not to use the new level, you can simply delete your WikiProject's C-Class category and clarify any amendments on your project's assessment/discussion pages. The bot is already finding and listing C-Class articles.

Please leave a message with us if you have any queries regarding the introduction of the revised scheme. This scheme should allow the team to start producing offline selections for your project and the wider community within the next year. Thanks for using the Wikipedia 1.0 scheme! For the 1.0 Editorial Team, §hepBot (Disable) 22:00, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

"Daggers"

Where was it decided to start using "daggers" (really crosses yeah? Dagger seems like a blatant retcon) for extinct taxa? Was this discussed at a Wikiproject? Somone recently added a slew of them to Nanshiungosaurus, to every taxon below Theropoda, and in the taxobox title. This seems to be at least a triple redundancy with the fact that the fossil range says Cretaceous... Dinoguy2 (talk) 08:53, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

There was just a discussion about this at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Palaeontology#Crosses_to_indicate_fossil_taxa. I think it's a bad idea for pterosaurs, non-avian dinosaurs, etc, for the simple reason of having to add a million of them to various paleo-articles. And then having to watch them closely as various IPs tinker with them constantly. No thank you! Firsfron of Ronchester 09:41, 6 July 2008 (UTC)
From Extinction: "it is estimated that 99.9% of all species that have ever lived are now extinct." It is thus arguably much more logical to specially designate those exceedingly rare species that are currently extant, rather than the very much more numerous ones that are extinct! -- Writtenonsand (talk) 06:36, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
I do not generally use daggers, but handle the matter individually. If some taxon is entirely extinct, I do away with it entirely and note the fact in the taxobox and the intro. If there is a number of extinct taxa but not really many, I note the extinct ones with (extinct) or (fossil) or (prehistoric) - the latter for pre-1500 Late Quaternary extinctions as a matter of convention (there is no real shorthand term for such guys). If there are mainly extinct taxa, I do use daggers; it is the most convenient way to handle e.g. List of fossil birds or taxon lists of geological epochs or formations. And from this experience, I think a restricted policy does far more harm than good; the demands of Wikipedia articles are far too various to "cut all hair using the same comb" as the proverb goes. Dysmorodrepanis (talk) 00:39, 17 July 2008 (UTC)
The daggers are useful in lists where there are extinct and extant species, but there doesn't seem to be much point in using them in dinosaur articles (since as everyone knows the dinosaurs are extinct and birds aren't dinosaurs ;P ) Sabine's Sunbird talk 00:55, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

Redirects on "G. species" disambiguation pages

Please see this discussion so that we can come to a conclusion about redirects used on "G. species" disambiguation pages.

Thank you, Neelix (talk) 00:45, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

Maintenance tags

Recently I've been noticing maintenance tags building up on dinosaur articles. In some cases, an IP had added dubious material and a WP:DINO editor has been adding a citation needed tag instead of removing the questionable material. There are even editors who are adding citation needed tags to material they themselves are adding (see for example here. Maintenance tags are ugly, and the articles that they are affixed to rarely get improved. I'd like to suggest removal of maintenance tags on project articles (along with the dubious material that caused them to be so tagged in the first place), instead of leaving these articles to collect multiple maintenance tags. Firsfron of Ronchester 23:54, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

Opposing view: Maintainance tags are useful and probably in fact necessary. I frequently see problems on Wikipedia that I am not in a position to correct, yet which IMHO should be marked so that other can correct them. "Ugliness" is highly subjective; notifications are supposed to be "ugly" (e.g. "Warning! Bridge Out!"); any "ugliness" of maintainance tags is very greatly outweighed by their necessity. Maintainance tags should never be removed without addressing the underlying problem (unless I suppose they have "obviously" been added as vandalism).
IMHO, removal of un-cited material, along with its relevant "citation needed" tag is acceptable, but it is preferable to leave the questionable material (unless it's "obviously" crazy, vandalism, or WP:NOT), along with its associated "citation needed" tag, until someone can fix it.
Obviously, this is always on a case-by-case basis. Best wishes to all. -- Writtenonsand (talk) 16:58, 27 July 2008 (UTC)
Thanks for your comments, Written. I appreciate them. We're supposed to be creating and maintaining a database of clean, freely-accessible articles. Non-encyclopedic content damages these articles. All the maintenance tags do is clutter up articles letting people know that non-encyclopedic content has been added to the articles. It sort of misses the point that if the dubious material was added in, it's not hard to remove it. Instead, the article gets tagged for "maintenance", but the maintenance never happens: we had articles sitting for two years waiting for "maintenance", when one simple edit, removing the junk, would have been a hundred times better for the article, for the reader, and for Wikipedia itself. I do agree with you that this is really on a case-by-case basis, though for the post part, adding a tag isn't helpful when that tag is just going to sit on the article... for years. A true maintenance tag would be one indicating that actual maintenance was being performed on the article, which is not the case. Firsfron of Ronchester 17:29, 27 July 2008 (UTC)
I think that we do basically agree but are emphasizing different aspects of the situation. IMHO you're right about removing "dubious material", but there are other types of maintainance tag situations where dubiousness of material is not the problem and where removing material won't be a real improvement. (Wikipedia:Template messages/Cleanup) -- Writtenonsand (talk) 23:44, 30 July 2008 (UTC)

Appearance of Conflict of Interest

Hi all,

I've made some edits to the metriorhynchid croc pages yesterday on recent phylogenetic analyses (I know not dinos, but though I'd put this up here and at WP Palaeo). However, one of the citations I've added is one of my own, so I was wondering if anyone wants to look over (and edit) the relevant pages to ensure no COI or appearance of it, that'd be great. The relevant pages are:

  1. Metriorhynchidae
  2. Cricosaurus
  3. Dakosaurus
  4. Enaliosuchus
  5. Geosaurus
  6. Metriorhynchus
  7. Purranisaurus
  8. Teleidosaurus

Cheers, Mark t young (talk) 08:05, 28 July 2008 (UTC)


Seeing as this issue has come up, and will most likely come up again, I've created Wikipedia:WikiProject Palaeontology/COI. Hopefully this will keep everything transparent and prevent any accusations of conflicts of interest. This is especially true after the 'issues' surrounding User:Consist (although there were other issues there too). What do you guys think? Mark t young (talk) 11:55, 28 July 2008 (UTC)
I'll be watching this with interest (pardon the choice of words), as the same question is liable to come up with me and Brachylophosaurus in a few weeks. J. Spencer (talk) 23:56, 28 July 2008 (UTC)
I have no papers, but I've never touched Rana subaquavocalis, as I worked with it in the late '90s/early 2000s. Overkill? Firsfron of Ronchester 05:31, 29 July 2008 (UTC)
Overkill? A bit. I have written on several species I have worked with (Cassin's Auklet, Western Gull, Christmas Shearwater). You occasionally have have to remember not to add personal observations unless you can cite them, but I don't think first hand experience is anything other than a benefit. Personally I'd see no conflict of interest unless you were pushing a particular POV (dino = bird versus not dino = bird for example). Sabine's Sunbird talk 05:54, 29 July 2008 (UTC)
:) I prefer to hear overkill rather than the alternative! Well the system is there is anyone ever wants/needs to use it. Cheers guys, Mark t young (talk) 13:51, 29 July 2008 (UTC)

"Omeisaurus tianfuensis" or "Mamenchisaurus jingyanesi"?

Omeisaurus or Mamenchisaurus?

A photo of a very large sauropod with extremely long neck has been added to the Omeisaurus page, as supposedly "Omeisaurus tianfuensis." See right. There are also two photos of an Omeisaurus specimen which is considerably smaller and has a much shorter neck and different skull. I posted those two which I photographed at the Miami Museum of Natural History display of dinosaurs from the Beijing Museum of Natural History. I believe the very large sauropod is mislabeled and probably is Mamenchisaurus jingyanesi, which the BMNH also sent on the same tours. I raised this issue on the Talk:Omeisaurus page, but so far no one has been able to give a definitive answer. Any help? Ecphora (talk) 01:43, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

I think there's a paper being worked on, or in press, that attempts to sort out (well, create and then sort out, as nobody has looked at this yet) the taxonomic nightmare that is Omeisaurus and Mamenchisaurus species. Apparently some species belong to the other genera, and the two genera are either synonyms or are getting split up into several new genera. Or something. Give it a year or two and it'll get sorted. For now, I'd stick with what the museum labels say, or if you can find out the specimen numbers, find papers that refer them to whatever genus and species. Maybe ask the DML? Dinoguy2 (talk) 04:49, 1 August 2008 (UTC)
My question is not what is the correct answer taxonomywise, but whether the BMNH actually labels the specimen in question Omeisaurus or whether it actually labels it Mamenchisaurus. That is, was the wrong label put on the exhibit (at a shopping center it appears) or did the person who posted the image perhaps make a mistake? I saw the Miami show and believe this specimen was included there and labelled Mamenchisaurus. Ecphora (talk) 09:40, 1 August 2008 (UTC)
A mistake is entirely possible. I saw the "Chinasaurs" exhibition a few years ago, and there were a couple of errors, like the pelvis being backward on the cast of Archaeoceratops. J. Spencer (talk) 00:12, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

Sources?

Hello all, I'm trying to break out of the realm of the video game article rut I've been running at WP:FAC and so have decided to cleanup and begin work on Bone Wars. Unfortunately, I don't really have much in the way of references so far, besides a TV show and two books; I was wondering if anyone had sources of any stripe (book/web/et al) that could help me out on this. Thanks in advance, Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs (talk) 16:00, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

I just found a hatful, but you probably wouldn't like them. -- Philcha (talk) 20:32, 1 August 2008 (UTC)
Uh... why not? Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs (talk) 22:29, 1 August 2008 (UTC)
G..gle - but the results might not meet your high standards for WP:RS -- Philcha (talk) 23:09, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

WP:DINO progress

WP:DABS gives an overall indication of the size of Wikipedia:WikiProject Dinosaurs. On January 12th, 2007 (the earliest reliable list) articles within the project comprised 2936.6 kb (2.87 MB); the average article was 3.28 kb long. By May 28th of that year, the project had grown to 3830.7 kb (3.74 MB), and the average article size was 4 kb. On November 28th (six months later), the database shows the articles had reached 4602.7 kb (4.49 MB), with the average article at 4.59 kb. On May 28th of this year, article space was 5193.7 kb (5.07 MB), and the average article size was 5.02 kb.

All this means is that the project continues to grow, not at the same rate of growth, but with about the same amount of new content being added every six months. Firsfron of Ronchester 02:54, 2 August 2008 (UTC)


New dinos found. And they are real old or something.

Dateline Poland:

"Paleontologists digging in a brickyard in southern Poland have discovered the remains of a dinosaur they say is a previously unknown ancestor of the Tyrannosaurus Rex.... the group also found a dicynodon -- a reptile which was a direct predecessor of mammals. 'We are almost certain that "Dragon" hunted animals like this herbivorous dicynodon, which looked like hippopotamus but was much bigger,' Sulej said." - http://www.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUSL148207720080802?sp=true - (I've added Wiki-links to the quote.)

You know, I've seen an awful lot of bad science journalism, and I suspect that Reuters doesn't have a lot of paleontologists on staff, but this might be the worst dino reporting since Anne Elk. (No criticism of Dr Sulej intended!) -- Writtenonsand (talk) 06:28, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

Most of these "news" stories are pretty awful. "T-Rex dinosaur"? Hee! Firsfron of Ronchester 06:35, 3 August 2008 (UTC)
I think you are premature to dismiss this report out of hand. Certainly, Reuters (or other popular media) may not be completely accurate for details, but the article quoted Doctor Tomasz Sulej of the Polish Science Academy (see his webpage), as follows:
"This is a completely new type of dinosaur that was so far unknown," Sulej said on Friday. "Nobody even expected that members of this group lived in that time, so this gives us new knowledge about the whole evolution of the T-Rex group."
Let's wait until there is a formal report by the paleontologist before condemning this story. Ecphora (talk) 15:33, 3 August 2008 (UTC)
Ecphora, the news reports quite often get these stories wrong. WP:DINO has, in fact, long-implemented the informal policy of using peer-reviewed journals as sources instead of "news reports" because of this very fact. Firsfron of Ronchester 16:57, 3 August 2008 (UTC)
I fully agree that this news article should not be the basis for a Wikipedia edit. On the other hand, one is on shaky ground stating "this might be the worst dino reporting since Anne Elk" -- this report might well turn out to be an accurate summary of Dr. Sulej's conclusions. Ecphora (talk) 17:09, 3 August 2008 (UTC)
But there's so much that is clearly wrong with this article. Ignoring the "T-Rex" instead of T. rex thing (it's so common), the grammar ("predator dinosaur", "T-Rex dinosaur"), the "5 meter (yard)" business (a meter isn't a yard, despite their close sizes)... Every years, dozens of news reports surface on the latest "T. rex ancestor", a term which is over-used and often highly inappropriate. The article states the new genus lived 200 million years ago (which puts it at the Jurassic-Triassic boundary, instead of at the K-T boundary with other tyrannosaurids). This is bad reporting. Firsfron of Ronchester 17:31, 3 August 2008 (UTC)
From what I've read I've about it, its Late Triassic in age. I'm pretty sure the T. rex angle is just to hook readers, but of course it could be some-kind of teturan ancestor (here's a drawing of it [6]). All idle speculation on my part of course. Mark t young (talk) 17:38, 3 August 2008 (UTC)
Liliensternus anybody? Secret Squïrrel 10:53, 6 August 2008 (UTC)

Firs nailed it--most news articles including this one aren't necessarily wrong, just so dumbed-down as to be useless. The phrase "T-rex group" is clearly supposed to mean "theropod" in this context, but they don't trust their readership to know what a theropod is. Dinoguy2 (talk) 23:55, 6 August 2008 (UTC)

Useful reference

Tom Holtz has just put up at this site a pdf update to the genus list in his dinosaur encyclopedia. Since it's an easily-accessed document from a known authority, and it covers a variety of useful parameters, I thought it might be helpful to bring it to your attention. J. Spencer (talk) 17:44, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

Very cool. Thanks for the link, J. Those tables are awesome. Firsfron of Ronchester 17:52, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

Illustrations for extinct species

there is currently a discussion here about the usfulness and validity of drawings and illustrations created by users being used on the various pages on wikipedia. As a result several pages have been deleted by the creator. There sould bee more discussion about this as it cotradicts WP:Dino policy. --Kevmin (talk) 21:51, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

We appreciate the head's-up, Kevmin. This could affect our own little project as well (eventually). Firsfron of Ronchester 00:57, 5 August 2008 (UTC)
I wonder if there's some way we could link or summarize image review discussions, which usually list sources, in an image description if the image is accepted by review? Dinoguy2 (talk) 08:01, 6 August 2008 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Transclusion. But I suspect the "source" page should be the image description page - if it's the Talk page, the transclusion will break when the Talk page is archived. Use <noinclude> ... </noinclude> in the image description page to exclude from the Talk page any stuff that's irrelevant, e.g. the usual "loaded by" and other technical details. N.B. this only works if the source page in the same wikimedia project, e.g. en.wikipedia but not Commons.
A way round the the Commons thing might be to include the image itself in a Talk page with an instruction to use the image's Talk page for discussion. Of course you'd have to log in again.
Alternative approach: set up a discussion page for each image as a subpage of the Wikiproject Dinosaur page; set up a subpage of the Wikiproject Dinosaur page as an index of these discussions; add a link to the index subpage on the Wikiproject Dinosaur page. Of course then everyone would have to watch the index subpage - unless you use a bot to notify all members of Wikiproject Dinosaur; Wikiproject Video games has a newsletter bot, you could ask them how to use / adapt it. -- Philcha (talk) 02:03, 7 August 2008 (UTC)
I think that a simple link, such as Approved by consensus at WP:DINO is all that's needed. Firsfron of Ronchester 06:45, 7 August 2008 (UTC)
I think there has been a rush recently to add art to the paleo articles for the sake of adding art. This is especially true for taxa for which we really have no idea what they look like, being based on a few bones. It gives the wrong impression of knowing more than is really known. Also, I am sorry to say, some of the art looks far from professional. Many of the animals are too fat, lack anatomical structure and sometimes look like an inflatable toy. What is really accomplished by adding a generic (vague) bipedal dinosaur to an article on an iguanodontid, or a generic sauropod to one on a sauropod? Wiki can never achieve an authoritative voice if conjecture (appearance of an extinct animal) cannot be separated from fact. It only strengthens the arguments against Wiki by its detractors Anky-man 11:45, 4 September 2008 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Anky-man (talk • contribs)

Good article nominations

This coming week promises to be a busy one for me, but after that, I plan to nominate Struthiomimus, Protoceratops, and possibly Tyrannosauridae for GA. I don't think there's much holding any of these back from GA, except someone nominating them (and some observations on the Peer Review for Struthiomimus). Abyssal recently did some nice editing on Protoceratops and the prose looks good. Sheep had nearly completed Tyrannosauridae, but wasn't able to finish it before Real Life interrupted again. If someone else wants to take a second look at these, it would be greatly appreciated. Firsfron of Ronchester 04:50, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

Struthiomimus is missing some of its taxonomic history; it was the go-to ornithomimid in the '20s and '30s, and there's S. brevitertius Parks, 1926, S. samueli Parks, 1928, S. currelli Parks, 1933, and S. ingens Parks, 1933 from those days. Russell 1972, Greg Paul's PDotW, and the Dinosauria II have all taken stabs at these species; S. samueli and S. brevitertius got to be in Dromiceiomimus for a while, S. currelli was sunk into Ornithomimus edmontonicus, and S. ingens was sunk into S. brevitertius. Then, of course, all four were sunk into Ornithomimus edmontonicus in the Dinosauria II chapter, which oddly missed that brevitertius was the oldest species and should have had priority over edmontonicus, and if not brevitertius, then samueli was also older. See also the Paleobiology Database. J. Spencer (talk) 05:52, 10 August 2008 (UTC)
I appreciate the Struthio-tips! Between The Dinosauria and PBDB, I should be able to sort this out. Thx. Firsfron of Ronchester 07:05, 10 August 2008 (UTC)
Did some work on Protoceratops this morning. All three are well-known enough that they could become FAs, but in general I think enough of the highlights have been hit for a shot at GA. J. Spencer (talk) 16:31, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

Open Peer Review

Just letting you know I've opened a peer review for Bone Wars. Any comments are welcome here. Thanks, Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs (talk) 20:10, 15 August 2008 (UTC)

That takes me back. Bone Wars was one of the first moderately-sized articles I created. Good work, particularly with the references (the ref tags weren't implemented back then). I'll see if I can find the time to help polish it a bit more. Pat (talk) 19:45, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

...and I just put it up for FAC -Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Bone Wars. Comments and help are appreciated (I don't trust my copyediting skills :P) Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs (talk) 01:54, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

Diabloceratops?

I looked at this[7] site, and found a skull cast of a so called "Diabloceratops eatoni". I don't recognise the skull, haven't heard the name before, and when I Google it, nothing much shows up. Anyone knows what it is? Seems like it's even on display somewhere: [8] FunkMonk (talk) 20:11, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

I've seen that skull discussed elsewhere. It's either in press or a "floating name" someone suggested and someone else ran with. I added it to my watchlist, both genus and genus/species. J. Spencer (talk) 23:10, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

Changes in Taxa Lists

For some time now I have observed "someone" altering the lists of species for various formations. This seems to have been done for the sole purpose of adding an illustration (which tend to be generic) to each species. Unfortunately, all of the relevant taxonomic data has been stripped away, thus dumbing down the information. Look at the lists for the Morrison Formation for example. No longer is there any information about what family, order, etc. a particular taxon belongs to. In addition, the references used to create the lists are gone. The "Description" category is often filled with information that is not descriptive, but simply an identification. This dumbing down of the information only plays into the hands of detractors of Wikipedia who say that articles are "unreliable", "simplistic", etc. I had joined Wiki to raise the quality of the paleo articles, but "someone" has been reversing this. I added a lot of the lists in a manner that made it easy for a user of an article to cut and paste into their term papers, scientific publications, etc. That is no longer possible with the recent changes.Anky-man 12:20, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Quick thought - the tables and faunal lists present different information. The two could conceivably both be present in the same article, with the tables cleaned up (i.e. no more "Placeholders of the placeholder"). J. Spencer (talk) 14:14, 4 September 2008 (UTC)
Another thought: there are only a few editors working on these articles, thus there is space for editors to work with minimal comment and input from others. This freedom can be good and can be detrimental. Anyone have any ideas on where we could get additional editors with more diverse interests? J. Spencer (talk) 17:50, 4 September 2008 (UTC)
I don't see any information being removed. In the Morrison example, all the prose faunal description paragraphs are there and fully sourced. The only thing that's been added are those tables with comprehensive lists of taxa present. Maybe for an article with a lot of good info, these tables should be kept to the end or moved, but for a lot of articles, they're an improvement over what was there previously regarding fauna (i.e. nothing, or such an incomplete list as to be misleading). The family, order etc. info should probably be kept to individual taxon articles anyway, we don't want intensive writeup for each species, just an overview of what species were present. Dinoguy2 (talk) 00:33, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

The Age of Reptiles DYK to go on main page

The famous work by Rudolph Zallinger should go on Main Page within a few days, just in case you want to look at it first.


Hadrosaurus

Hadrosaurus says that this genus name is generally considred a nomen dubium, and that "many artists have ... recreated Hadrosaurus with skulls from other, related species such as Gryposaurus and Brachylophosaurus".
Can anyone add to the article a straightforward mention of what, if anything, Hadrosaurus is considered to be synonymous with? (E.g., Gryposaurus, Brachylophosaurus, something else, nothing known ...) -- 201.17.36.246 (talk) 19:13, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

As far as I know, it's not considered to be a synonym of anything currently (except perhaps Ornithotarsus), although artists have used related animals as models for the skull (and where did Brachylophosaurus come from there?). If you go back a couple of decades, though, Hadrosaurus was proposed by Jack Horner as a synonym of Kritosaurus (which had been thought to be the same as Gryposaurus since 1942). If you go back to the turn of the 20th century, it gets ugly: people were playing mix and match with Claosaurus, Diclonius, Hadrosaurus, Thespesius, and Trachodon mostly using material that would be named Anatosaurus and later split among Edmontosaurus and Anatotitan (which may be the same as Edmontosaurus, and in my opinion probably is [nice series from Cope's "Diclonius" to the Senckenburg edmontosaur to bog-standard E. annectens]). (I warned you it got ugly) J. Spencer (talk) 21:51, 9 September 2008 (UTC)
I read this and thought, "Hmm, okay", but now I'm doing a double take.
If I understand matters correctly, Hadrosaurus (the type specimen) is "an almost complete set of limbs, along with a pelvis, several part of the feet, twenty-eight vertebrae (including eighteen from the tail), eight teeth and two small parts of the jaw", which William Parker Foulke dug up in 1858 in Haddonfield, New Jersey, and which are currently presumably in a drawer (or mounted) in a museum somewhere. Joseph Leidy named them Hadrosaurus: however, we now consider this a nomen dubium, i.e., we wouldn't call them Hadrosaurus.
So what are they? Edmontosaurus? Several different species (chimera)?
(And to continue with the "ugly" theme we have going, Ornithotarsus redirects to Hadrosaurus, which article does not mention that genus name anywhere.) (List of dinosaurs gives "Ornithotarsus — possible junior synonym of Hadrosaurus", which should mean that, technically speaking, the specimen is not Ornithotarsus.) (Historical taxonomy -- how would we spend our copious free time without it? :-) )
-- 201.17.36.246 (talk) 22:16, 10 September 2008 (UTC)
No, they're still Hadrosaurus. Nomen dubium doesn't mean the name is invalid, just that it's very unlikely any new specimens will ever be classified under that name. It's like something like Gryposaurus is a junior synonym of Hadrosaurus, but because the older name is dubious, they'll never be formally sunk. Dinoguy2 (talk) 00:15, 11 September 2008 (UTC)
For our purposes, a nomen dubium is a name based on material that is too poor for other material to be reliably assigned to that name. It is also a subjective concept, and nonbinding on other researchers. Hadrosaurus, lacking a skull, is now typically considered a nomen dubium (although it is conceivable that a greater understanding of hadrosaur postcranial bones, or the discovery of another skeleton in the Haddonfield area with identical anatomy to Hadrosaurus as well as a skull, would bring it back). When something is assessed as a nomen dubium, the original material keeps the original name. Therefore, that original Haddonfield material is identified as, and will remain so for all time under all but the most farfetched of contingencies, Hadrosaurus foulkii.
The truly "ugly part" comes in later, when Cope and Marsh started to get decent hadrosaur fossils from the west, and tried to stick them in with previously-named genera. Cope called what we now know as Anatotitan, Diclonius mirabilis, because he thought (a) it pertained to Trachodon mirabilis and (b) that Leidy had abandoned Trachodon. Marsh named Claosaurus annectens for what we now know as Edmontosaurus annectens. After the two died, succeeding paleontologists tried various other combinations until Lull and Wright (1942) came up with Anatosaurus for Cope and Marsh's material, as well as a few other problematic species. J. Spencer (talk) 03:07, 11 September 2008 (UTC)
Weirdness. Thanks for the education, all. -- 201.17.36.246 (talk) 05:26, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

Seismosaurus:

Hey all, I'm back - hopefully... I'm looking to get back into the swing of things and I'd like to start off with Seismosaurus, as I recently bought a book on it. However, I've noticed that it's been merged into Diplodocus. Why is this, as I thought Seismosaurus would have its own page (Brontosaurus scenario), and if not, what do I do with this friggin book I've got... ;) Also, could someone tell me how many Featured dino articles I've missed out on, as I need to update the dinosaur portal... Glad to be back - I've also got a book on Sue the T rex too, so that may be next... Cheers, Spawn Man (talk) 02:10, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

Hey, Spawn Man! We've been keeping the GAs and FAs updated, but there haven't been many this year - everyone's been out off and on for sustained periods of time. Firs mentioned a few articles he was mooting for GA a few sections up, and I'm trying to get myself to face Edmontosaurus (it's become convenient to wait until I get ahold of Sternberg's description of Thespesius saskatechewanensis). Good to see you back! J. Spencer (talk) 02:26, 10 September 2008 (UTC)
Hey SW, as for what to do with the book, take a red pen to every mention of Seisomosaurus and write Diplodocus? ;) What's the name of the book? Might still be good for the Diplo article, depending on how old it is. A lot of seismosaur books focused on things like the gastroliths which have since proven extremely questionable. Dinoguy2 (talk) 05:52, 10 September 2008 (UTC)
I know that, but I was thinking that maybe we could create a page similar to Brontosaurus, as Seismosaurus is part of paleo history - I mean the biggest dino ever? And does it work like that, simply replacing Seismo with Diplodocus...? Cheers, Spawn Man (talk) 08:31, 10 September 2008 (UTC)
My mistake, I assumed that Bronto still had a page, but it's now been merged... So can I create a new subspecies article, merge it into diplodocus, a seismo article, or something else? Spawn Man (talk) 08:33, 10 September 2008 (UTC)
Is there enough for a whole new page? Couldn't it just be put in the Diplodocus article? FunkMonk (talk) 15:01, 10 September 2008 (UTC)
I think we made a decision somewhere not to make articles below the genus level, because there's not enough to say about individual species. Anyway, not only is Seismosaurus a species of diplodocus, it is most likely THE type species, D. longus. It's not only a Diplodocus, it's the Diplodocus ;)
And yes, that's basically the way it works. Reclassification is just a name change. And it was never the biggest dino ever--they originally thought it was the longest, but it turns out they overestimated by a huge amount, and now it's known to be smaller than Supersaurus, let alone Amphicoelias. I think the amount you can say about Seismo can fit nicely into the Diplo article, once we get a more detailed History of Discovery type section going, which can talk about notable specimens. Dinoguy2 (talk) 00:21, 11 September 2008 (UTC)
Alright... The book mostly goes into detail about the excavation of the finds and some of the biology etc. I'll see what I can do. Hey, has anyone seen Firs lately? Spawn Man (talk) 04:08, 11 September 2008 (UTC)
I am here, Spawn Man. Welcome back, and good luck with the article. :) Firsfron of Ronchester 05:18, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

"9 Dinosaurs that marked the planet"

http://www.zmescience.com/dinosaurs-that-marked-the-jurassic-period

9 dinosaurs, hmm? Let's see: Amphicoelias fragillimus. Check. Velociraptor. Brachiosaurus. Tyrannosaurus rex. Always a favorite. Spinosaurus aegyptiacus. Triceratops. "Ichthyosaur". Say what? "Plesiosaurs". Somebody didn't do their homework. And finishing up with Archaeopteryx, which has the helpful description "not a dinosaur, but rather the link between dinosaurs and birds."

But we knew that this was going to be shaky right from the introduction: "Which dinosaurs are the true leaders of these amazing lizards??" Heh. (Article also contains | a graphic that will be familiar to some of you ...)

(Oh good grief -- I just saw that URL. I didn't know that Velociraptor, Tyrannosaurus, Spinosaurus, and Triceratops were "Jurassic".)

-- 201.17.36.246 (talk) 23:01, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

Maybe they should change their site motto from "Not exactly rocket science" to "Not exactly rocket scientists...". ; ) That article was hilarious - I love how they've collected their images for the article from different places, including the McDonalds figurine for the Brachiosaurus pic...! Honestly though, if we didn't have creationists and retards, who would paleontologists have to laugh at? Spawn Man (talk) 08:08, 13 September 2008 (UTC)
Ourselves? -- Philcha (talk) 10:19, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

Proposed archive for cited web pages

Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)#Wiki_cache_for_references has a proposal to cover the risk of cited web pages going offline or being taken over by advertisers / domain resellers. Although WP:DINO uses mainly academic articles, some of these are only / mainly available via the web, e.g. Acta Paleontologica Polonica; there's also an "open" biology article site whose exact name I can't remember right now. I suggest WP:DINO should pitch in, and also post on the Talk pages of any other Wikiprojects that would be seriously hurt by the disappearance of important pages / sites. I've posted similar notices at WikiProject Chess and WikiProject Video Games, and will also post at WikiProject Paleontology and WikiProject Computing. -- Philcha (talk) 10:11, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia 0.7 articles have been selected for Dinosaurs

Wikipedia 0.7 is a collection of English Wikipedia articles due to be released on DVD, and available for free download, later this year. The Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team has made an automated selection of articles for Version 0.7.

We would like to ask you to review the articles selected from this project. These were chosen from the articles with this project's talk page tag, based on the rated importance and quality. If there are any specific articles that should be removed, please let us know at Wikipedia talk:Version 0.7. You can also nominate additional articles for release, following the procedure at Wikipedia:Release Version Nominations.

A list of selected articles with cleanup tags, sorted by project, is available. The list is automatically updated each hour when it is loaded. Please try to fix any urgent problems in the selected articles. A team of copyeditors has agreed to help with copyediting requests, although you should try to fix simple issues on your own if possible.

We would also appreciate your help in identifying the version of each article that you think we should use, to help avoid vandalism or POV issues. These versions can be recorded at this project's subpage of User:SelectionBot/0.7. We are planning to release the selection for the holiday season, so we ask you to select the revisions before October 20. At that time, we will use an automatic process to identify which version of each article to release, if no version has been manually selected. Thanks! For the Wikipedia 1.0 Editorial team, SelectionBot 22:48, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

Jurassic Fight Club

OK, I'm going to admit that I'm watching this series on the History Channel, which isn't known for good fact checking. They have a graphic that shows the timeline of dinosaurs that flies by several times per episode. It shows the Cretaceous ending at 55 mya. Since Firsfron and I too Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event to FA status, and I spent days pouring over various references, I never once saw a date other than 65 mya. The narrators also say 65 mya to describe the death of the dinosaurs. Is anyone else seeing this? Or is the K-T event article all wrong (which I doubt). Any ideas? OrangeMarlin Talk• Contributions 22:35, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

I've watched some of the episodes, and it's for entertainment only: fun, but not accurate. I hadn't noticed a 65 to 55 mya flub on the show, but it doesn't surprise me at all. We're getting a lot of incorrect stuff added to Majungasaurus, Nanotyrannus, etc, based on this series. Gotta love dino-fancruft. :/ Firsfron of Ronchester 23:01, 16 September 2008 (UTC)
"...which isn't known for good fact checking."
JFC checks facts? I thought they just made stuff up. It's complete science fiction, and like all good sci-fi, has a few internal inconsistencies ;) Dinoguy2 (talk) 23:58, 16 September 2008 (UTC)
It is a guilty pleasure. But they make the pretense of being scientific. You'd think that someone would have caught the 55 mya mistake, because if you're going to pretend like you've got science backing you, at least get it accurate to what is said in about 99.9999% of the literature. So, how much do people want to bet that 55 mya for the extinction of dinosaurs is going to be added in some article with the citation referencing JFC? OrangeMarlin Talk• Contributions 14:36, 17 September 2008 (UTC)
More recent episodes use the 65 million years ago standard. Maybe they read this? LOL. OrangeMarlin Talk• Contributions 14:49, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Discussion about using different classification systems for dinosaurs and extant "reptiles"

Two editors are currently pushing for a different standard to be adopted for extant "reptiles", discussion is at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Amphibians_and_Reptiles#Tuatara. I'm letting you know as it's unclear how contradictions between the two sets of articles can be avoided. Papa Lima Whiskey (talk) 19:33, 19 September 2008 (UTC)


Dimetrodon vs Tyrannosaurus. Yeah, right.

From Dimetrodon:

Dimetrodon was one of several prehistoric animals seen in the Rite of Spring segment of Disney's Fantasia, where it is shown as an intermediate predator, preying upon Nothosaurus but fleeing from a Tyrannosaurus.

It's been a while since I've seen Fantasia. Are these critters really shown together? -- 201.53.7.16 (talk) 22:58, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

Can't remember the film (it's not that good, IMO), but that would be typical of the way it segues through major evolutionary stages in the Rite of Spring segment - it would not mean Disney thought they could ever have met - they were separated by about 210 M years. OTOH if it was shown preying on a Nothosaurus, that would have been a major error, as there's a gap of very roughly 55M years. -- Philcha (talk) 23:10, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

Maastrichtian life

The article Flora and fauna of the Maastrichtian stage really needs work. I've fixed some obvious things (Metasequoia was marked as extinct, while none of the theropods were!) but there are still no invertebrates, fish, etc. listed, and only one plant! Can someone who knows how to find sources for these things help? Vultur (talk) 06:41, 25 September 2008 (UTC)


Allosaurus replica at Allosaurus: Why so green?

Allosaurus has a nice photo labelled "Replica of an Allosaurus fragilis skull". The skull/replica is an amazing green color. Does anybody have any idea what's up with that? The fossils that it's based on really were that color? (If so, what mineral, please?) Or somebody just decided that it was time to inject a little style into the museum repros? :-) -- 201.53.7.16 (talk) 20:13, 25 September 2008 (UTC)

Maybe it's just me, but it does look like oxidized bronze... Circeus (talk) 01:50, 26 September 2008 (UTC)
Yeah the coloration and consistency in the shot suggests it's not due to the lens or the background, so it might be bronze (which would be weird for a display unless it's old, but who knows.) On the other hand, it needs rescuing from deletion. Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs (talk) 02:10, 26 September 2008 (UTC)
Yeah, I put it in the article myself in the first place, so it isn't to offend anyone that I nominated it for deletion. I'll see if I can contact the author, since the website itself doesn't have licensing which is compatible with Commons. FunkMonk (talk) 14:07, 26 September 2008 (UTC)
Interesting. I'm inclined to suspect that the original fossil was not bronze. :-) -- 201.53.7.16 (talk) 11:25, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Incidentally, an interesting "Did You Know?" sidebar for this which will be new to some people: The only known fossil of the small Australian theropod Kakuru was preserved as opal. Now that's cool. -- 201.53.7.16 (talk) 11:31, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Library of Annotated images

I'm reviewing Tyrannosauridae for GA. I noticed that in some images the text (part of the image) is illegible because the images are scaled down. Template:Annotated image avoids this problem and has several other advantages - see example I've inserted at Tyrannosauridae#Growth and compare it with the older version at Tyrannosaurus#Life_history.

This is one of several such images used at dino-related articles. Where an annotated image is used in several places, it's good to wrap it in its own template:

  • Editors only have to copy the template invocation into artciles, not the whole of the Annotated image "code".
  • Adjustments / corrections made to the template automatically propagate to all articles.
  • Since other WPs tend to follow English WP, it will make language conversion much easier. I recently "sold" the idea to a Dutch editor, and the result is now used in several Dutch articles on mass extinctions.

If this approach is used, the question is where to store the tempates of individual Annotated images. A buddy and I have been storing ours in sub-pages of Template:Annotated image, but that's not sustainable if use of Template:Annotated image takes off in a serious way. I suggest creating a library of dino-related Annotated images as a sub-page of Wikipedia:WikiProject Dinosaurs, with a link to it on the project page. Someone recently showed me how to make such a library self-indexing. If WP:DINO agrees with this approach and where the link to the library should be, I'll set it up and create the first few items. -- Philcha (talk) 08:51, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

My ingenious friend Martin has developed the beginnings of a way to make Annotated images categorise themselves - the base Template:Annotated image has already done so, see this bit of the Categories list. That's an alternative approach that might be worth considering. We're now discussing whether there's an easy way to to do this without needing to know template coding. Either way it makes it possible for a template to be in more than 1 category , e.g. "Annotated image templates: Dinosaurs" and "Annotated image templates: Extinctions". -- Philcha (talk) 15:20, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

This sounds useful. What is our current population of annotated images? I know about the illustrated hadrosaur phylogeny. J. Spencer (talk) 03:40, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Recent and upcoming main page articles

For reference, Aerosteon was just up on Did you know, and Massospondylus will be the featured article on the 8th. J. Spencer (talk) 03:42, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Dinosaur Genera List

For reference, AOL discontinued the service George Olshevsky was using to host the Dinosaur Genera List, so that resource is out for the time being. J. Spencer (talk) 17:45, 1 November 2008 (UTC)

Has been fixed. J. Spencer (talk) 01:09, 7 November 2008 (UTC)

FT:T-rex's family

Please state your opinion about this topic. Nergaal (talk) 04:11, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

Fossil ranges on taxoboxes

Is there any sort of moratorium on placing the nifty fossil range code on the taxobox of every dinosaur article as I did on Ilokelesia? I can't guarantee this is one of those things I will finish myself but I think it is a necessary heads-up for you all... Or not? Opinions appreciated. Dracontes (talk) 17:28, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Species time vs. location tables

Hello, I thought I'd propose that a new type table to be used in higher taxon articles (in addition to the current phylogenetic ones).

Proposed Locations: These charts would be placed in the pages for higher taxonomic levels

Goal: To allow the reader to quickly 'at a glance' see the distribution of the fossils species in a taxon over time & space.

Organisation:
- The Y access would be time (in faunal stages)
- The X access would be location by continent (ie. Laurasia, Gondwana, Central Europe)

Content:
- The inside of each box would have a list of Species & Formation (eg. Zephyrosaurus, Cloverly formation)
- The faunal stages and locations in which no species are known would be left blank (and ones with dubious remains would be given the indet. suffix)

--Hrimpurstala (talk) 18:34, 8 December 2008 (UTC)


Rebbachisaurus:Where?

Rebbachisaurus doesn't happen to mention where Rebbachisaurus lived, although it does state that "The discovery of Rayososaurus, a South American sauropod nearly identical to Rebbachisaurus, supports the theory that there was still a land connection between Africa and South America during the Early Cretaceous, long after it was commonly thought the two continents had separated." Further confusing matters, the article has a photo captioned "Head and neck of a Rebbachisaurus in front of a Giganotosaurus". (The remains of which, per Giganotosaurus, "have been found in Argentina" - i.e., this implies that Rebbachisaurus and Giganotosaurus were both South American, in which case how does a connection between Africa and South America come into the picture?) As far as I can tell Rebbachisaurus was really African and Rayososaurus and Giganotosaurus South American. Can anybody straighten this out? Thx. -- 201.53.7.16 (talk) 14:10, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

Dinodata lists Algeria, Morocco, Niger, Tunisia, and Argentina as places where Rebbachisaurus has been found. Weishampel et al mentions only Africa both on p. 263 and p. 304. The cover of The Complete Dinosaur depicts Giganotosaurus attacking Rebbachisaurus, which as far as I know would put it in South America, not that cover art is a good source of info, but I thought it was worth a mention anyway. I guess that doesn't really solve the problem, but someone here probably knows more than I do. Abyssal (talk) 15:59, 22 December 2008 (UTC)
As far as I know, the "Rebbachisaurus" material from Argentina is a single vertebra that looks like Rebbachisaurus, described in 1902. It's also from the Late Cretaceous, not early, as other rebbachisaurids. For what it's worth, sounds to me like this probably is not really Rebbachisaurus, but I don't know if any studies have been done since comparing the SA bone to the north African material. Dinoguy2 (talk) 23:26, 22 December 2008 (UTC)
Hmm, I'm starting to think that the answer to my question "Can anybody straighten this out?" may well be, "Actually, no." :-) -- 201.53.7.16 (talk) 21:08, 23 December 2008 (UTC)
Rebbachisaurus is effectively limited to Africa at this time, although two South American genera, Rayososaurus and Limaysaurus, were once thought to be examples of Rebbachisaurus. It may be that the museum photo is of Limaysaurus with an outdated label, as Limaysaurus is known from most of the skeleton. J. Spencer (talk) 00:49, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

Archive?

The talk page is getting horrendously long, why hasn't this page been archived yet? Abyssal (talk) 03:34, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

'Acus neither J. nor I had done it yet, a situation which I've just now addressed. I've kept the most recent stuff and archived the oldest stuff to Archive 20, but I've neglected to come up with a good description for the archived material... Firsfron of Ronchester 03:48, 24 December 2008 (UTC)


China finds major dinosaur site

China finds major dinosaur site (Shandong province, late Cretaceous) - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7806062.stm

Professor Zhao Xijin, the palaeontologist in charge of the excavations, told Chinese state media: "This group of fossilised dinosaurs is currently the largest ever discovered in the world... in terms of area."

-- 201.53.7.16 (talk) 19:12, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

  1. ^ Lucas S, Herne M, Heckert A, Hunt A, and Sullivan R. Reappraisal of Seismosaurus, A Late Jurassic Sauropod Dinosaur from New Mexico. The Geological Society of America, 2004 Denver Annual Meeting (November 7–10, 2004). Retrieved on 2007-05-24.
  2. ^ Lucas, S.G., Spielman, J.A., Rinehart, L.A., Heckert, A.B., Herne, M.C., Hunt, A.P., Foster, J.R., and Sullivan, R.M. (2006). "Taxonomic status of Seismosaurus hallorum, a Late Jurassic sauropod dinosaur from New Mexico". In Foster, J.R., and Lucas, S.G. (ed.). Paleontology and Geology of the Upper Morrison Formation. New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science (bulletin 36). pp. 149–161. ISSN 1524-4156.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
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