Talk:Orrorin

Why isn't Paranthropus mentioned?

Sorry if I have misunderstood something, but the genus name Praeanthropus is totally new to me. Why isn't the genus Paranthropus mentioned as a synonym? The species Praeanthropus robustus and Praeanthropus boisei is very often called Paranthropus robustus and Paranthropus boisei. Sometimes is also Paranthropus aetiopicus considered to be a species of that genus. / Achird (talk) 22:54, 8 January 2011 (UTC)

This all looks rather dodgy. The robust australopithecines are all under Paranthropus, and most of the rest of the names here are duplicated under Australopithecus.

See en:Praeanthropus to see if there's anything salvageable (it has Praeanthropus as a segregate of Australopithecus, with Orrorin added), or whether it should just be reverted back to its original existence as Orrorin (monotypic). 80.176.90.190 16:39, 19 January 2012 (UTC)

Not the most commonly used taxonomy

I just edited this page to remove the bits that are clearly incorrect (the inclusion of P. boisei and P. robustus - no one includes robust australopithecines in Praeanthropus).

However, I'm a bit unclear on how to proceed further. Praeanthropus is not most the commonly used genus name for any of these species. The name was coined in the 1930s, and resurrected in 1997 for the gracile east African members of Australopithecus, on the basis that the authors considered Au. africanus to be more closely related to Homo than to Au. afarensis. This did not catch on, however - most workers continue to classify these species as Australopithecus. There was another proposal promoting Praeanthropus in 2003, which argued that the recently described Orrorin would also belong in this genus.

This didn't catch on either, though - Orrorin is more commonly used than Praeanthropus by an order of magnitude. Following the links to all these species takes you to their Australopithecus sp. page, except for Orrorin, which is listed as Praeanthropus tugunensis.

The help pages seem a bit vague on how to choose between competing taxonomies, but the current setup is contradictory. If Australopithecus afarensis is valid, then Praeanthropus is a junior synonym of it and we should have an Orrorin page. This would follow the most common usage in the literature.

I'll leave this here a bit for comment in case I'm misunderstanding how Wikispecies is supposed to work; then if no objections I'll go ahead and resurrect Orrorin and mention Praeanthropus as a subjective junior synonym of Australopithecus.Kaficek (talk) 14:50, 28 April 2019 (UTC)