Talk:Straight-tusked elephant

Untitled

I don't really understand this sentence: It is closer to L. cyclotis than L. cyclotis is to the African bush elephant, L. africana, thus invalidating the genus Loxodonta as currently recognized. Surely the solution is simply to transfer Palaeoloxodon antiquus into the genus Loxodonta. If anything is invalidated, it's the idea of Palaeoloxodon as a separate genus. Given that the two Loxodonta species are so similar as to have been thought conspecific until recently, it doesn't seem justified to split the genus. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Graminophile (talk • contribs) 08:14, 24 June 2017 (UTC)

Nonsense

In the article: Since the remains of the trunks do not show human markings, extinction by natural causes can not be ruled out.

Well, who could rule out a thing that was never meant to be? In the article there is no other argument about the human extinction of paleoxodon, unless you think that over 500,000 of co-existence did not led some humans to hunt some paleoxodon. But when they came extinct and why it's totally another matter. 62.11.3.98 (talk) 02:56, 28 November 2019 (UTC)

Merge

See the discussion at talk:Schöningen forest elephant

Very specific uncited claims about diet

This artifle has way too much uncited text. One of the main culprits of this is this massive 5kb dump by a now inactive user. In it are made very specific claims about the specific kinds of plant that P. antiquus consumed, based on supposed "tooth residues" that have no citations at all, and I can't find after extensive searching what source they would have used. Other studies on the diet of this species based on dental microwear are much less specific. I am inclined just to remove the text entirely. Hemiauchenia (talk) 08:10, 28 June 2022 (UTC)

GA Review

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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This review is transcluded from Talk:Straight-tusked elephant/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Nominator: Hemiauchenia (talk · contribs) 22:05, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

Reviewer: Chiswick Chap (talk · contribs) 15:56, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

Comments

This is a well-constructed article that covers the topic well and I will accordingly have only a few, mainly minor, points to make.

• as far north as Great Britain - the Denmark fossils are further north, no?

• The two images in the infobox could both benefit from losing the "in Rome", "in Germany" glosses to their captions. The article is about the species not Europe's museum collections.

• Why File:Palaeoloxodon phylogeny.svg rather than a normal Wikipedia cladogram? The curving arrows and % labels create an odd effect. The caption should have a normal bluelink ref, too, in keeping with the rest of the article.

• likely resulted in increased openness of woodland habitats due to actions like destroying trees.[36] - "Destroying" may miss an important point here: many European broadleaved trees do not die when trashed by elephants (STEs) or coppiced by humans: they recover, often remarkably quickly. George Monbiot suggests that this response is a direct adaptation to STE damage. If so, not only did the STE have a major ecological role (probably it was a keystone species for open woodland) but it had a major selective effect on Europe's trees. I think you need to mention and cite Vera here.

• I see you link Wood-pasture hypothesis, which cites Vera, with a 'see also' link at the head of 'Distribution and habitat'. I'm not convinced this is enough to cover the bases here; the WPH needs to be in the main text, briefly explained, and cited. I'm not sure I understand the split between the habitat and paleoecology sections either: don't these broadly overlap?

• By the same token, File:Straight tusked elephant Eemian landscape.jpg's caption characterised by grassy areas, open woodland and closed forest seems to be a misguided attempt to cover all bases? If the STE was present, there basically can't have been closed forest. Certainly there'd need to be a pretty persuasive argument that the STE could somehow be involved with both open and closed canopy forest (seems like a contradiction in terms, really).

• A multitude of species of dwarf elephants - well, several, but perhaps not a multitude (does feel rather too highly-coloured as a description for an encyclopedia). Since these species evolved from the STE, would it not be relevant to have an image and some sort of account of the phylogeny of at least the main species?

Images

• File:Straight_tusked_elephant_Eemian_landscape.jpg which is from SCIENCE ADVANCES: this says that there's EITHER a CC-by-SA or by -NC depending on the paper, decided it says at the time the paper was submitted. I can't see where the paper says it's CC-by-SA, i.e. it's not clear that the Commons license is correct. The link to the actual license should be added to the Commons page, please.

• File:Middle Pleistocene landscape in Manzanares valley.png: much the same, but here I can't see the source exactly. How do we know it was released under CC-by-SA 4.0?

• The rest of the images are on Commons and plausibly licensed.

• If there is an image for the human interaction section, e.g. a bone with cut marks, that would be helpful.

Sources

All the sources are of good quality and are directly relevant. All those that I spot-checked are fine for the use made of them here.

Summary

This article is basically ready for GA status, as soon as the few items above have been addressed. Chiswick Chap (talk) 16:46, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

Commnents From Hemiauchenia

• Added a new paper discussing distribution in Denmark.
• Removed references to locations of skeletons per your suggestion.
• A multitude of species of dwarf elephants when counting named species it's probably not that many, but when you're counting the number of the indeterminate not named species from the Greek islands the number is quite a bit higher, probably over a dozen, I've changed to "a number of species" which I think suffices.
• It's impossible to accurately reflect the reticulate nature of the evolution of the straight-tusked elephant with a simple coded Wikipedia cladogram, the way Wikipedia cladograms function is simply not designed to do this. If it were possible to do using a proper coded cladogram I would have done it. If the % of admixture was minor I think we could ignore it, but given that over 30% of its genome comes from African forest elephants it would be essentially just wrong to present a binary fission tree ignoring the admixture. I am willing to change the arrows to straight on the figure if this is better, but I think the % admixture is necessary information that was included in the original figure.
  • Ah, admixture: then I suggest that at least the caption should say so. Actually the four percentages on the diagram are then too much: all we need is the 8% and 36%, and each of those could have a word of explanation, such as "8% introgression". I'd also suggest a different linestyle such as dashes, ideally combined with a different colour.
• For File:Straight_tusked_elephant_Eemian_landscape.jpg, when viewing the paper [1] clicking the "I" button on the sidebar on the right shows that the paper is explicitly under a CC-BY 4.0 license rather than NC. There is no indication that the images are excluded from the license, and as far as I can tell it is the usual understanding that when a paper is CC-BY licensed this usually includes the entire content of the paper unless explicitly stated otherwise.
• For File:Middle Pleistocene landscape in Manzanares valley.png, the rights and permissions section at the end of the article [2] states: This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. looking at the figure [3], there does not appear to be be any indication that it is not included under the license.
  • This link needs to be on the Commons page.
    • Fixed. Hemiauchenia (talk) 18:43, 24 November 2024 (UTC)
• I personally didn't add the Vera/Wood pasture hypothesis related content, that was added by @AndersenAnders:. My main issue is that I have had difficulty finding papers that explicitly discuss both the wood pasture hypothesis and the straight-tusked elephant in the same article. (The closest I can find is [4].) I've modified the section in accordance with your suggestions, removing explicit reference to tree destruction. Hemiauchenia (talk) 18:25, 24 November 2024 (UTC)
  • Many thanks for the updates.
  • Then we just need something on the admixture front and we're all done. To save faffing about I've said the bare minimum in the caption, and reffed it. More could be done but it's not mandatory. Chiswick Chap (talk) 18:57, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.