Talk:Huxleysaurus

Merging with Hypselospinus

I think there are several good reasons not to merge:

1. Norman has not made a very good case for an identity with Hypselospinus, not showing any autapomorphies of the latter in the Huxleysaurus material.
2. Wikipedia is not a biology textbook. We simply provide information about concepts. The concept "Huxleysaurus" exists and we give a summation of what has been said about it in the secondary literature. If this information had fully been present in the Hypselospinus article, the principle of Summary Style would have to be applied and it would have to be split off anyway.
3. We have to resist the urge to consider any new article as the definitive word about a certain subject. It is the last word — but only until the next paper :o). Norman and Paul have been bickering about iguanodonts since 2007 and hopefully they'll be able to disagree for many years to come. At the moment it is too early to determine whether any scientific consensus is developing and that alone makes it incorrect to merge.--MWAK (talk) 09:47, 27 March 2014 (UTC)

None of them seem to use cladistics either, do they? Seems like a third party would have to settle it. FunkMonk (talk) 13:42, 27 March 2014 (UTC)

I agree with MWAK on the basis of keeping them separate:

1. Wikipedia has many article (such as Megapnosaurus) separate from (for Megapnosaurus, Coelophysis), even when almost all recent studies find the two are synonym generically.
2. They have only been synonymized by one author in two publications. Again with Megapnosaurus and Coelophysis, they have been synonymized by many different authors, including the describer of Megapnosaurus, and are still separate.
3. Finally, Huxleysaurus should not be merged with Hypselospinus because Norman shows no features shared between the two, he practically just lists off about why the autapomorphies of Huxleysaurus are not distinguishing, unintentionally trying to make Huxleysaurus a Nomen Dubium, but still not unique enough to strongly synonymize. IJReid (talk) 13:51, 27 March 2014 (UTC)

As the consensus seems to reject merging and the person adding the merging banner has not even put forward any argumentation in favour of it, I propose to remove the banner.--MWAK (talk) 06:24, 3 April 2014 (UTC)