Talk:Rail (bird)

Untitled

Leave the picture for the moment, Adrian - I'll attend to that shortly by finding a tall, narrow picture to replace it with Tannin 08:59 8 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Stub tag

There's a stub tag on this article, when the wikiproject bird tag says its been rated as a start class article. Canadianshoper 17:18, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

Virginia Rail?

In my section of the USA (Northeast), and in general in the northern US and in México, the most common rail seems to be the Virginia Rail. Why, then, is this species not mentioned in the article? David spector (talk) 21:04, 2 February 2010 (UTC)

There are forty genera, and 142 species, found all over the world. A number of common and rare NA species are in the article, but not every species can get mentioned. In articles about families and other higher level taxa, mentions of individual species are often in the context of illustrative examples (Takahe = example of flightless species, Clapper Rail = example of long-billed species).Sabine's Sunbird talk 22:08, 2 February 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia does have a page on the Virginia rail] Abote2 (talk) 21:10, 4 November 2018 (UTC)

Descendants of non-ancestor?

This sentence in Rail (bird)#Flight and flightlessness seems to be garbled: "In examining the phylogeny of G. philippensis, although the species is clearly polyphyletic, it is not the ancestor of most of its flightless descendants, revealing that the flightless condition evolved in rails before speciation was complete." How can it not be the ancestor of its descendants?

Anyway, I'm adding a gloss on "polyphyletic", as it is very technical. New sentence (not much better): "In examining the phylogeny of G. philippensis, although the species is clearly polyphyletic (it has more than one ancestral species), it is not the ancestor of most of its flightless descendants, revealing that the flightless condition evolved in rails before speciation was complete." Zaslav (talk) 21:07, 11 June 2019 (UTC)

I came here to report the internal contradictions of this exact same sentence, so it's nice to see I'm not the only one noting it. There are two parts to this. The use of the term "polyphyletic" is clearly problematic. It's fine to say that a species is polyphyletic as part of a sentence to say that therefore the species is wrongly recognised. A better term for the situation here is probably "hybrid" (i.e. G. phillippensis has multiple ancestors). But the second part is even more problematic: "it is not the ancestor of most of its flightless descendants" is pretty much an oxymoron. Better to leave it out, the subsequent phrase "revealing that..." makes somewhat more sense.

But the bottom line problem seems to be that the paper [Kirchman 2012] is based on purely mitochondrial data. At the time of publication, this was all that could be expected. But the history of our understanding of the relationship between Home sapiens, H. neanderthalensis and H. denisova should give pause. Any Homo phylogeny based on mitochondrial DNA would be hopelessly confused (and incorrect, inferring complete genetic isolation between the three that clearly didn't exist). But full DNA sequencing has revealed most of the recent genetic history of Homo. In that case, we have a pretty fair idea of the genetic interaction between the three, even of the timings, but it's still debated whether they formed one species or three (i.e. the debate isn't really about the underlying genetic facts of Homo evolution any more, but about how to apply cladistic terminology to a network phylogeny). With only MTDNA to go on, and with much more recent radiations and hybridisations in Gallirallus than in Homo, it's pointless to try to discuss the actual network relationships in terms of a cladistic terminology: nonsense is the predictable result.

How does this fit with the 'no original research' goals of wikipedia? Not something I fully understand. But allowing internally contradictory statements to stand doesn't seem part of the solution. Urilarim (talk) 01:42, 27 July 2024 (UTC)

Gymnocrex

Where does it fit in the cladogram? 104.153.40.58 (talk) 16:13, 19 April 2023 (UTC)

POV? Or what do you call this kind of shade-throwing?

""The family Rallidae was introduced (as Rallia) by the French polymath Constantine Samuel Rafinesque in 1815.[31][32] The family has traditionally been grouped with two families of larger birds, the cranes and bustards, as well as several smaller families of usually "primitive" midsized amphibious birds, to make up the order Gruiformes. The alternative Sibley-Ahlquist taxonomy, which has been widely accepted in America, raises the family to ordinal level as the Ralliformes. Given uncertainty about gruiform monophyly, this may or may not be correct; it certainly seems more justified than most of the Sibley-Ahlquist proposals."

There _has_ to be a less inflammatory way of saying this. Not knowing the status of the taxonomy variations being discussed, I'd rather not take the chance of fixing it. Is this reasonable, though? "The Sibley-Ahlquist taxonomy, on the other hand, raises the group(clade? I feel that repeating family here is argumentative given what comes after: maybe not if it's changed) to ordinal level as the Ralliformes. Though this has become widely accepted in America, uncertainty about gruiform monophyly prevent it from being adopted everywhere."

I can't just drop that it there, given that I don't know how standard the Sibley-Ahlquist taxonomy is in America or anywhere else, or whether my restatement introduces some distortion of its own. But seriously, the current language reads like a blind item in a gossip column.````LucyKemnitzer — Preceding unsigned comment added by Lucy Kemnitzer (talk • contribs) 04:24, 9 March 2024 (UTC)