Welcome to the Pterosaurs task force page, which aims to act as a reference and assessment point for articles about pterosaurs on Wikipedia. It is a task force (subproject) of WikiProject Palaeontology. This page will help interested editors gather better information and articles on pterosaurs. Important tasks always include expanding and cleaning up articles, adding taxoboxes and standardising all articles.

Assessment[edit]

The current status of all pterosaur articles is as follows:

Tasks[edit]

Tasks include the following, in no particular order:

Useful links

Criteria for inclusion[edit]

Articles should not get any more specific than genus level. Individual species should be discussed in the article about the appropriate genus. "Significant" higher order taxa should also get their own pages.

Article titles

The titles of all articles about individual genera should be composed simply of the scientific generic name (see next section), except where the name is preoccupied.

The titles of all articles about higher level taxa should consist of the common name of the group (see next section), with a redirect for the formal scientific name, or vice versa. This way both formal and common names will lead to the same article.

Pterosaur taxa names[edit]

Species

When a species is mentioned (on its own page or another), the scientific binomial name should at least be mentioned once. After this, the genus name or common name can be used.

Do not use common names too much, they look amateuristic. If you use them, realise that you are referring to the genus, or to an order ending on -ia. For example, pterodactyl can be used for Pterodactylus or for Pterodactyl. Even more informally it can refer to the family, as equivalent to pterodactyloid. Inconsequential use confuses the reader.

Plurals:

Best use common names, as they may be pluralised in English : e.g. 45 pterodactyls, but never 45 pterodactyluses.

Don't pluralise scientific (Latin) names in an English way: Quetzalcoatluses is wrong. Quetzalcoatluses is correct, but now you are meaning several species belonging to the genus Quetzalcoatlus, some of which you don't recognize. It may sound strange, but "Sarah is attacked by lots of Quetzalcoatlus and 3 Pterodactylus" is the correct way. The same applies to pluralising binomial names: "John was stampeded by a large herd of Quetzalcoatlus northropi and 5 Pterodactylus suprejurensis". There is no change. Don't use binomials in this case unless you want to confer that the identification of the species is very important.

Higher order taxa

The formal names of all groupings higher than genus are capitalised, never italicised. If fitting the situation, common names are preferable. These are in lowercase.

Example:

"Dsungaripterus is a genus of Pterosaur" sounds a lot better than "Dsungaripterus is a sauropsid genus belonging to the Pterosauria". The same applies to other higher-order taxa.

Note that a pterodactyl belongs to the genus Pterodactylus, while a pterodactyloid belongs to the family Pterodactylidae.

Templates[edit]

Primary References[edit]

The best source for accurate information on pterosaurs is the primary literature, where original research is published. After you get a basic feel for the terminology, it becomes possible to learn by immersion by reading articles and trying to piece together what the authors are saying. A big problem, however, is access. Finding a copy of a journal can be difficult, and making copies can really add up. Subscriptions are usually obscenely expensive because most of these journals have pretty low circulation. So how do you get a hold of technical papers?

Most scientific journals now offer PDFs of their articles online. Unfortunately, you are usually required to subscribe to the journal, pay a bunch of money, or go to a library that subscribes to the journal in order to access them. If you do live near a university or public library, it is not a bad idea to find out what journals they subscribe to and then spend a few hours in the library downloading PDF files and emailing them to yourself... it's a lot cheaper than making copies. However, if you don't have that kind of time or don't live near a major library, there are still a lot of places to find papers online for free, which some of you may already know about. But I'll list some of the ones I know about here:

Journals

Individual Researchers

Other Sites

I'm sure other people know of other places to get articles. Please add them to the appropriate section above, as long as they are legal. Google searches or searching for "pdf" on the Archives of the Dinosaur Mailing List might also nab you some more.

Category