Talk:Caenagnathus

Taxonomy

So, we have an article for Caenagnathus which says it's valid, but other WP articles, notably Chirostenotes, which say it's a jun. syn. of Chirostenotes. While its position may not be clear, WP articles should reflect academic consensus or present relevant perspectives if no consensus. At the least, WP articles should be consistent! 124.169.225.94 (talk) 04:53, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

Current consensus is that it's a synonym of Chirostenotes. One paper has found otherwise, but this doesn't seem to have impacted consensus (and frankly, the methodology was flawed, because it was testing for something else and the non-synonym result was simply a byproduct of the analysis). MMartyniuk (talk) 13:22, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

So, if the current consensus is that it is a jun. syn. (FWIW I agree), shouldn't this article either redirect to 'Chirostenotes' or at least reflect that in the text? At the moment the last sentence says that Caenagnathus is more primitive with the listed cite being an online appendix to Holtz's 2007 book Dinosaurs. 124.169.225.94 (talk) 06:21, 6 April 2012 (UTC)

I guess we should treat this as valid until somebody does more work using Anzu to try an match beak morphology with hand/foot morphology. Right now "Chirostenotes" (hands, "Macrophalangia" (feet"), and "Caenagnathus" (jaws) are all basically form taxa. Hopefully Anzu will be a rosetta stone to figure out if some or all of these morphs are different parts of the same animals. But it should be noted that, contrary to a recent edit, the Anzu paper did not test for the synonymy of Caenagnathus and Chirostenotes. When both jaw and post cranial forms were entered, the whole family collapsed into a polygamy, making synonymy testing impossible. The use of Caenagnathus in the paper is not vouching for its validity, just being conservative until somebody tests for synonymy. Dinoguy2 (talk) 00:14, 21 March 2014 (UTC)