Talk:Reptile

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This article is part of WikiProject Amphibians and Reptiles, an attempt at creating a standardized, informative, comprehensive and easy-to-use amphibians and reptiles resource. If you would like to participate, you can choose to edit this article, or visit the project page for more information.

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I think that this page must discuss the problems with classifying DNA =). The traditional classification of reptiles excluded birds; however the modern way of classifying animals depends on cladistics and DNA analysis. This newer information proves that external appearances can often be misleading; birds are just as closely related to other groups within reptiles as other reptiles are related to each other. As such, modern day classification is in the process of reclassifying these organisms. RK

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What does "From this point of view, the reptiles are simply the basal amniotes, and so are not a valid group." mean? According to the article on amniotes, mammals and birds are also amniotes, so the amniotes are a monophyletic group, yes...? -- Oliver P. 11:44 31 May 2003 (UTC)

Amniotes are a valid group, but basal amniotes are not. I've altered the text to try reflecting this. Also, I've taken out the bit about how the classification changed because new discoveries suggested certain reptiles were closer to birds. This has been understood for a long time, the change is that paraphyletic groups have not been discouraged until recently. User:Josh Grosse

Thank you for clarifying that. Sorry, I think I must have ignored the word "basal" there because I wasn't sure what it meant. But I understand the article as it is now. -- Oliver P. 15:07 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)

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RK, your paragraph was good, but the problem isn't new ideas about relationships - birds and mammals have been considered descendants of reptiles for over a century. The problem is new ideas about classification (i.e. that paraphyly isn't monophyly). I've changed the text to reflect this. Josh

Contents 1 Plesiosauria 2 Dinosauria 3 Plea For Standardization 4 A few reptile images 5 Paraphyletic vs. monophyletic 6 Peer review of tuatara 7 Digestive? 8 Add Smithsonian link? 9 "Sauropsida" links to Reptilia? 10 Classification References 11 List of extinct reptiles? 12 Sauropsida or Reptilia?

[edit] Plesiosauria

Should the order Plesiosauria be added to the list of orders of the class Reptilia? The Plesiosaur belongs to the order Plesiosauria. DarthVader 08:08, 17 July 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Dinosauria

We need a decision here on whether Dinosauria is a superorder under the class Archosauria or the class Reptilia. It is ridiculous because Saurischia says Reptilia and then Eoraptor says Archosauria. A decision either way is fine with me. DarthVader 08:45, 17 July 2005 (UTC)

I believe Archosauria (modern birds and ancient dinosaurs) are considered a reptiles, but not in class Reptilia. This is based on discoveries by Chinese scientists in the last 20 years or so which planted birds squarely in the dinosauria suborder, combined with the wish to differentiate modern 'reptiles' and modern 'birds' into different classes. If you look at the bird page it has been classified as in the class Archosauria, suporder Dinosauria. According to the Archosaur article the word is Greek for "ruling reptiles", so dinosaurs are still reptiles just not common reptiles. --Zenyu 12:26, July 21, 2005 (UTC)

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No factual changes to the article. Some rewording; comments about metabolic heat, hatchling care, "warm-blooded" animals and speed. Made various words into links. And...

There was a terrible traffic accident. One tortoise had plowed into the side of another one at an intersection. In the flashing lights from an ambulance, a policeman came over to interview a bystander, a snail sitting on the curb.

"What happened?" asked the cop.

"I don't know. It all happened so fast... it was just a blur." David Shear 00:35, 20 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Plea For Standardization

So far, looking through pages for various reptile lineages, I've found class Reptilia, class Sauropsida, class Archosauria, and class Aves. Various archosaurs are listed under each of these classes--birds obviously are aves, dinosaurs and pterosaurs are currently Archosauria, crocodiles are Reptilia, and the entyr for Archosauria itself is Class Sauropsida! This is needlessly confusing. Someone, maybe one of the WikiProjects, needs to take charge and find some kind of standardization for reptile taxonomy that won't result in an edit war. I know people who work in each of these areas like to have the class rank favor their critters, but until Wikipedia switches to cladistics (which I don't think it should, really), we need to find common ground. Personally, I think Class Saurposida for reptiles>mammals and class Synapsida for reptiles<mammals seems pretty fair. Maybe keep Class Mammalia for crown synapsids and Class Aves for crown dinosaurs. Dinoguy2 02:50, 9 December 2005 (UTC)

Members of Wikipedia:WikiProject Tree of Life have given support to the use of Benton's taxonomy]. Unless there are any objections, I'm going to 'be bold' and start changing class Reptilia to Class Sauropsida. Dinoguy2 03:23, 10 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] A few reptile images

Image:Lacerta aigilis.jpg

• Danish picture of a sand lizard (Lacerta Aigilis)

Danish viper

• Danish picture of a viper.

Image:Black_Viper_Head.jpg

• Head of a Black Viper.

Those are nice Images, and I'd like to see them in articles. However, I have little knowledge about reptiles, so I won't add them myself, sadly. vidarlo 14:03, 6 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Paraphyletic vs. monophyletic

This might be easier to understand with a picture of the tree of vertebrates (or at least reptiles, birds and maybe mammals). The easiest way for me to understand the issue was to realize that crocodiles are in fact more closely related to birds than to turtles. Does anyone think this should somehow be integrated? Lukas 22:44, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

Yes, wikipedia needs a template that draws evolutionary trees, much like the timeline functionality. - Samsara _contrib ^talk 02:55, 28 February 2006 (UTC)

This can sort of be done already, using an ascii cladogram like the one here [1], and would look like this:

Sauropsida 
 ├─Lepidosauria
 └───Archosauria
        ├─Crocodilia
        └───Aves

The problem is it's a real pain and kind of tedious to build from scratch like that, so yeah, a template would be fantastic.Dinoguy2 03:50, 28 February 2006 (UTC)h.u.m/p

[edit] Peer review of tuatara

ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh Dear All,

Since some of you may be interested in the subject, I would be delighted to hear your feedback on the current state of the tuatara article. Direct link. Many thanks.

Samsara _contrib ^talk 02:54, 28 February 2006 (UTC)how does a tuatra reprduce

[edit] Digestive?

Can anyone make a section reptiles' digestive and/or circulatory system(s)? I'm not an expert, so i know i can't. Lbr123 04:16, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Add Smithsonian link?

Hello! I am a writer for the Smithsonian's Center for Education, which publishes Smithsonian in Your Classroom, a magazine for teachers. An online version of an issue titled "Reviled and Revered: Toads, Turtles, Snakes, and Salamanders" is available at this address:

http://www.smithsonianeducation.org/educators/lesson_plans/herps/start.html

If you think the audience would find this valuable, I wish to invite you to include it as an external link. We would be most grateful.

Thank you so much for your attention.

[edit] "Sauropsida" links to Reptilia?

Why do links to Sauropsida lead to the Reptilia page? They are different taxa. Sauropsida has always included birds, while Reptilia traditionally has not. Even in phylogenetic taxonomy, although they have similar content, Sauropsida is a stem-based clade which includes Reptilia, a node-based clade.

It doesn't link to Reptilia, it links to Reptile, which is a common name. Just as Aves links to Bird, which is not the name of any clade. Wikipedia guidelines say that article titles should be common name,s not scientific names, wherever possible. Also, the reptile and dinosaur wikiprojects follow Benton's taxonomy, in which Class Aves ("birds") is separated from Class Sauropsida ("reptiles"). Anyway, many (if not most) Sauropsida-Reptile redirects have been switched to just sauropsida by now, by people who disagree with my logic here. ;) Dinoguy2 13:45, 2 June 2006 (UTC)

But the verncaular term for Sauropsida is "sauropsid", not "reptile". Benton's scheme is not in common use and is in direct violation of the original (and still more popular) meaning of Sauropsida, anyway. If Wikipedia must use Linnaean ranks (which I disagree with, but that's another issue), they should use Classis Reptilia--it's a far, far more common practice.

I argued for this initially but there was some very vocal opposition that wanted the term reptile banned from use around here. You might want to bring this up at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Dinosaurs, as it's a more active group and many members were involved in the original debate. I still prefer Class Reptilia over Sauropsida, for what it's worth. I think having seperate pages for Sauropsid and Reptile is redundant and confusing to the average reader. If anything, the term Sauropsid should be discussed in the taxonomy section of Reptile.Dinoguy2 20:17, 4 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Classification References

I found an interesting one. Anyone with access to the journal care to add this info in?

Modesto, S.P.; J. S. Anderson (2003). "The Phylogenetic Definition of Reptilia". Systematic Biology 53 (5): 815-821.

Shrumster 07:23, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] List of extinct reptiles?

I noticed that there is a list of reptiles, that includes living reptiles only. Would it be a good idea to also have a list of extinct reptiles, similar to how there are lists of extinct mammals and birds? 71.217.98.158 19:23, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Sauropsida or Reptilia?

What's the deal with listing the class as "Sauropsida"? Doesn't that include birds? The basic fact is that it's entirely impossible to combine Linnaean classification with cladism with any consistency. Reptiles are a paraphyletic group, and the class name for them is "Reptilia." Whether this is a "valid" taxonomic group seems like the wrong question to ask - the traditional classifications just don't work if you insist on monophyletic groups, and trying to pretend it does just leads to confusion. If we are discussing Reptiles as a group excluding birds, which is exactly what we are doing in this article, we should call them "Reptilia." john k 05:14, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

I agree, actually, but early on there was a lot of resistance to this--not sure if changing it back now would fly. Something to bring up at Wikiproject:Reptiles or Dinosaurs (which is probably more active). Also, we agreed quite a while back to follow Benton's taxonomy. He uses Sauropsida as a paraphyletic group that excludes birds, so as synonymous with the then-contentious Reptilia (and paraphyletic Class Synapsida for the stem mammals). If you can propose another, comprehensive Amniote classification that would work better, I'd be very open to having a look. Dinoguy2 05:52, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

Well, my basic feeling on subjects like this is that Wikipedia is far too eager to embrace the newest trends, and that a staid reversion to traditional classifications, with some discussion of why newer literature casts doubt on them, is better than trying to incorporate the newest stuff into the way we actually organize things. Taxonomy is basically an artificial discipline, an attempt to impose classifications and discrete identities onto chaotic, continuous phenomena. As such, I'm not sure why there's any particular need for a "comprehensive Amniote classification." If I must provide one, I'd suggest that for every article on taxonomic groups that conveniently fit into Linnaean schemes, the table simply give the traditional Linnaean categories - Phylum Chordata, Class Mammalia, Reptilia or Aves, and then whatever Order...articles on other terms could explore the various groups used without attempting to impose a false consistency on them, or squeeze them into Linnaean taxon types when there is absolutely no general agreement as to what level they fall under. The basic fact of this issue is that there is no generally agreed upon scheme for classifying all of these various groups. There is a traditional Linnaean scheme that is generally agreed upon to be somewhat misleading, and then there are a variety of postulated schemes that not everybody really agrees on. As such, it seems to me that the best way to proceed is to stick with tradition as much as possible for the basic structuring of our coverage, and to deal with newer hypotheses in article text. john k 07:09, 7 March 2007 (UTC)