Talk:Pelmatozoa

Rewrite / remove original research?

This page does not quite reflect the current status of Pelmatozoa, which is rather complicated. Some cladistic workers still see a monophyletic Pelmatozoa, although this seems to be a minority view. Even without monophyly, the term is noted in recent papers as being of use as an informal category.

No source is given for the assertion that pelmatozoan stems are "analogous" to any part of phoronids, who are protostomes and not even remotely closely related to pelmatozoans, which are deuterstomes.

As for the taxonomy, it is more detailed than is needed for this page (details of lower classifications are better handled on those pages), and cites 44 sources without any indication of which information came from which source. This seems likely to be original research in the sense of synthesizing a unified taxonomy from disparate sources that might not agree with each other. I consider it acceptable to show how one source adds something to a base tree from another source, as the parts can be credited clearly. But combining large-scale trees inevitably mixes methodologies. Particularly as the sources span both cladistic and Linnaean eras of work.

My preference would be to rewrite the text to reflect a brief history of the term: Leuckart's original definition, Bather's 1900 taxonomy which remained the standard for the next 60 or so years, and then recent cladistic revivals (such as Smith, 1984) and disputes. I'd also give taxonomy lists or cladograms for the key definitions, but only a level or two down (Classes or at most Orders, as everything else is too controversial and better addressed on pages for Blastozoa, Eocrinoidea, Crinozoa, etc.).

Any objections or counter-proposals? I'm trying to do a fairly comprehensive updating / cleanup of echinoderm pages at the subphyla and class level, where needed (mostly for a subset of the extinct taxa- pages for extant groups are in pretty good shape).

Ixat totep (talk) 19:18, 31 October 2024 (UTC)

Given the lack of response, I'm going to go ahead and rework this page soon, along similar lines to what I'm doing with Eleutherozoa (the other subphylum in the old Pelmatozoa vs Eleutherozoa classification).

Ixat totep (talk) 21:04, 7 November 2024 (UTC)