A fact from Raranimus appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 30 September 2009 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:
Raranimus is within the scope of WikiProject Animals, an attempt to better organize information in articles related to animals and zoology. For more information, visit the project page.AnimalsWikipedia:WikiProject AnimalsTemplate:WikiProject Animalsanimal articles
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Palaeontology, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of palaeontology-related topics and create a standardized, informative, comprehensive and easy-to-use resource on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.PalaeontologyWikipedia:WikiProject PalaeontologyTemplate:WikiProject PalaeontologyPalaeontology articles
Latest comment: 15 years ago4 comments2 people in discussion
The text indicates the mammals as being a "descendant taxon". This was defended by referring to the cladogram in the describing article, which would imply this. Such an implication is indeed present — but only if we would want to use that concept in the first place. The authors of the article however, do not use it. And this is not because of some arbitrary choice of words: in modern phylogenetics mammals do not descend from therapsids, they are therapsids. Using the outdated concept thus — apart from being inferior as it is, well, outdated — severely misrepresents the very source it refers to!--MWAK (talk) 07:09, 1 October 2009 (UTC)Reply
Good arguement. What I meant was that the class Mammalia is a descendant taxon of the order Therapsida. These rankings are a relic of the outdated Linnean classification system. Although the clade Therapsida contains the clade Mammalia, Therapsida treated as an order is paraphyletic because mammals, which are not really considered therapsids in Linnean classification, are descendants of the therapsid order. Thus there is no such thing as a descendant taxon in modern phylogenetics, but they can still exist if they are descendants of a taxon that is paraphyletic based on rank. Perhaps I should clarify this confusion by having the article state "the class Mammalia" instead of just "mammals". If I intended for the word "mammals" to mean the clade, that would mean that thousands of people were misinformed by reading the main page of Wikipedia when the article was featured in the DYK section! Smokeybjb (talk) 19:14, 1 October 2009 (UTC)Reply
Perhaps they were ;o). The present text is of course correct. But why not leave out such references to the Linnean system completely? If the authors don't bother about them, why should we?--MWAK (talk) 06:13, 2 October 2009 (UTC)Reply
I usually wouldn't phrase it that way in an article, but the way it is worded makes it seem more interesting to laypeople who were reading the hook on the main page. If the hook said "Did you know ... that the recently described synapsid Raranimus is the most basal member of the clade Therapsida, which mammals also belong to?" not many people would be interested enough to read the article, and many would not even know what a clade is. Smokeybjb (talk) 21:15, 2 October 2009 (UTC)Reply
