Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Palaeontology

James A. Jensen

The James A. Jensen article is currently in serious need of POV clean-up, with the majority of information added by an SPI account (his son). As a heads up, I'm currently without a home computer, so I'm only on infrequently and not able to tackle this in as much depth as needed.--Kevmin § 00:01, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

I have tagged out as much of the SPI added material as possible, and it all should be vetted, with anything not verifiable to secondary neutral sources removed.--Kevmin § 19:39, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

"List of The Prehistoric Life of..." pages

Abyssal created mass numbers of pages called "List of The Prehistoric Life of somewhere" (e.g. List of the prehistoric life of Texas). Looks like there are uncountable numbers and hard to search, some are specifical for Paleozoic, Mesozoic, Cenozoic. Since these pages are not updated for a long time, in addition there are multiple images that is misleading or inaccurate (this image of shark[1] for example, labelled as Cretalamna but different). Existing in these pages will cause showing inaccurate image in image search, so hopefully we can tackle to reduce outdated information. Since information is mostly not updated, possibly page themselves need revisit? Ta-tea-two-te-to (talk) 10:27, 30 March 2023 (UTC)

The only one that "might" semi-okay is List of the Cenozoic life of Washington (state), since I've been maintaining and updating it as new data is published, plus I deep dived into the underlying Fossilworks data to find the actual references for the sections. I think that if the lists are kept, they need to have a lot of attention from User:Abyssal to bring them up to par, and in any instances where sub lists (Cenozoic, Mesozoic, etc..) are present the parent list needs to be culled and hatnoted to the sublist.--Kevmin § 18:50, 30 March 2023 (UTC)

The lists don't seem very useful without giving some context about what the listed organisms are; fish, brachiopod, mollusc? I've come across some incoming links to articles about extant (recent) plants from these lists where the intended link is a hemihomonym under the ICZN (with no Wikipedia article), but it takes some checking to figure what disambiguation term to use for the animal redlink. And there more of these lists in user space with a hefty number of links to disambiguation pages. Plantdrew (talk) 00:10, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

I don't see why we need these either. Categories exist. Lythronaxargestes (talk | contribs) 02:11, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

They originally were categories. An admin said they would make better articles, so that's what I did. Abyssal (talk) 04:32, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

I'm going to have to hard disagree with that admin. Lythronaxargestes (talk | contribs) 22:23, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

Apparently the Waukesha butterfly has an upcoming paper with an official name

I was looking at possible new papers for the Waukesha biota and came across an abstract from the Geological Society of America from 2021 that shows three Waukesha arthropod taxa (Acheronauta and Parioscorpio). One of them is Papiliomaris kluessendorfae, an arthropod, that has features quite similar to the butterfly. Here is the brief description “The uncommon Papiliomaris kluessendorfae gen. et sp. nov. (proposed), previously considered to be a marellomorph now reinterpreted as a crustacean-like, bivalved, filter-feeding arthropod. This last taxon is intended to be named in honor of Joanne Kluessendorf, due to her instrumental role in both the discovery and original description of the Waukesha Lagerstätte.” I am not going to add the name as it is not in an official paper, but I thought that it was worth bringing up incase the name is eventually featured. Here is the page with the name: https://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2021AM/meetingapp.cgi/Paper/367946. Fossiladder13 (talk) 15:35, 1 April 2023 (UTC)

It’s also worth noting this name also pops up in this abstract from 2019, https://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2019AM/webprogram/Paper341247.html Fossiladder13 (talk) 18:23, 1 April 2023 (UTC)

Timeline infobox structural error

When I go to the Pleistocene article and look to the right at the infobox timeline chronology, I can't really even click on the top Holocene epoch. It is cut off in my Chrome browser. I'm not sure if this is a recent error that has crept in but it should be fixed. Cheers. Fyunck(click) (talk) 19:45, 2 April 2023 (UTC)

Project-independent quality assessments

Quality assessments by Wikipedia editors rate articles in terms of completeness, organization, prose quality, sourcing, etc. Most wikiprojects follow the general guidelines at Wikipedia:Content assessment, but some have specialized assessment guidelines. A recent Village pump proposal was approved and has been implemented to add a |class= parameter to {{WikiProject banner shell}}, which can display a general quality assessment for an article, and to let project banner templates "inherit" this assessment.

No action is required if your wikiproject follows the standard assessment approach. Over time, quality assessments will be migrated up to {{WikiProject banner shell}}, and your project banner will automatically "inherit" any changes to the general assessments for the purpose of assigning categories.

However, if your project has decided to "opt out" and follow a non-standard quality assessment approach, all you have to do is modify your wikiproject banner template to pass {{WPBannerMeta}} a new |QUALITY_CRITERIA=custom parameter. If this is done, changes to the general quality assessment will be ignored, and your project-level assessment will be displayed and used to create categories, as at present. Aymatth2 (talk) 20:35, 12 April 2023 (UTC)

Move request at African mammoth

• See Talk:African_mammoth, please pariticipate if interested, thanks. Hemiauchenia (talk) 22:59, 12 April 2023 (UTC)

List of Cambrian genera

Despite being deleted at AfD, this list has been effectively recreated at List of Cambrian genera, as such I have nominated it for deletion again, see Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of Cambrian genera. Please participate if interested. Thanks. Hemiauchenia (talk) 19:27, 29 April 2023 (UTC)

Requested move at Talk:Pseudamphicyon#Requested move 9 May 2023

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Pseudamphicyon#Requested move 9 May 2023 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. ModernDayTrilobite (talk • contribs) 15:05, 17 May 2023 (UTC)

List of Chengjiang Biota species by phylum

Hi, the article List of Chengjiang Biota species by phylum is a bit outdated, being that @Hemiauchenia and @Fossiladder13 seem to have more knowledge on the subject, could you help me to expand it? I have started on my sandbox based on an unfinished version by PaleoEquii. Iezer (talk) 10:25, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

@Iezer, Sure, I would be happy to help. I'll get right on it. Fossiladder13 (talk) 14:37, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

@Iezer side note, I find it kind of funny how "A small arthropod related to Leanchoilia, also known from the Burgess Shale" is pretty much repeated throughout the page. Just published my first edit on it. Fossiladder13 (talk) 14:47, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

Yes, it was in the version I copied, presumably because the description of some genus was copied and pasted several times to save work and then replaced with other content, but not in all. Iezer (talk) 14:58, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

Thank you! Iezer (talk) 14:56, 1 June 2023 (UTC)