Talk:Mantellodon

The diagnosis

The current version of the article naming this taxon available from Gregory Paul's website appears to have a new diagnosis of Mantellodon, so now it's different from the diagnosis of Darwinsaurus. Does anyone knows whether there was a reprint of the book were the taxon was named with a fixed diagnosis for Mantellodon? Or perhaps this is something that was only fixed in the PDF on Paul's website? --Macrochelys (talk) 19:31, 9 April 2016 (UTC)

I have not seen the original paper, but it seems that the PDF is exactly the same. I am not sure, but maybe Norman (2010) was mistaken, and the diagnosis in Paul's was different, and only included materials in the type specimen. Maybe something to contact Paul about. IJReid ^discuss 21:02, 9 April 2016 (UTC)

• As for Lusotitan's edit summary question about merging Paul synonyms, the problem is that there isn't consensus for what's synonymous with what... FunkMonk (talk) 00:54, 17 February 2019 (UTC)

Norman has pretty thoroughly cleaned them up and I'm not aware of anyone making counterarguments since his 2014 article in Hadrosaurs off the top of my head. The question though would be whether that's considered a long enough period of time to sink them here. Lusotitan (Talk | Contributions) 01:08, 17 February 2019 (UTC)

The Darwinsaurus article at least says "In a recent SVP abstract, Karen Poole considered Darwinsaurus a possible junior synonym of Huxleysaurus based on unpublished cladistic results.[4]", whereas Norman considers it a synonym of Hypselospinus. We could also need independent confirmation for Norman's synonymisations; who has agreed with them? FunkMonk (talk) 01:22, 17 February 2019 (UTC)

Darwinsaurus is the only such case, and since that's only an abstract I'm inclined to ignore it until they get it published (if they ever do); and they're still arguing it's a junior synonym of something else. The Huxleysaurus article would be kept, I suppose. Regarding acceptance, I asked a friend and they said that McDonald's phylogenetic codings (as well as those of other papers) follow the taxonomy of Norman (for example, the material he considers Mantellisaurus is all coded for it, and so on for the other taxa), which seems like strong enough acceptance to me. An example pointed to was the S2 supplementary file of McDonald et al. (2017) [1]. Lusotitan (Talk | Contributions) 01:56, 17 February 2019 (UTC)

Any further thoughts on this FunkMonk? My proposal is to merge the pages Sellacoxa and Kukufeldia into Barilium, Darwinsaurus into Hypselospinus, and Mantellodon and Proplanicoxa into Mantellisaurus, with mention of the abstract on Darwinsaurus in both the Hypselospinus and Huxleysaurus pages. Lusotitan (Talk | Contributions) 22:56, 17 February 2019 (UTC)

Oh, and also relevant is that McDonald has directly independantly argued for Proplanicoxa as a synonym of Mantellisaurus in his 2011 paper, and has stated his support for the lumping of Sellacoxa informally online. [2], if his phylogenetic codings weren't evidence enough. Lusotitan (Talk | Contributions) 02:56, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

Hard to say, it's a loot of merges... Maybe we should ask the people at the Therosaurus discussion what they think. FunkMonk (talk) 07:47, 18 February 2019 (UTC)