Talk:Contectopalatus

Merge with Phalarodon?

Maisch & Matzke (1998) named the new genus Contectopalatus for what was previously known as Mixosaurus atavus. They continued to use it in their following publications (i.e., Maisch & Matzke (2000), Masich & Matzke (2001), Maisch (2010)), Brinkmann (2004) also accepted it as valid. However, other ichthyosaur workers tended to keep it sunk into Mixosaurus (i.e., Sander (2000), McGowan & Motani (2003)). Jiang et al. (2005) treated Contectopalatus as distinct, but soon after, the same team, minus Maisch and Matzke (and plus Schmitz), assigned the species to Phalarodon as P. atavus (Jiang et al. (2006)). The two most recent publications on the taxon, Liu et al. (2013) and Engelschiøn et al. (2023), both refer to it as P. atavus, the latter, not involving the authors of the original synonymy, features a (brief) discussion of mixosaurid systematics that doesn't even mention Contectopalatus, despite noting the similar issue of Barracudasauroides. The two major ichthyosaur phylogeny papers of the modern age are Ji et al. (2016) and Moon (2017), the former of which has P. atavus within Phalarodon, the latter of which has it labeled as Contectopalatus on the cladograms, though neither discuss their decisions. The only recent usage of Contectopalatus as a valid genus in prose in the technical literature that I have found is in Fischer et al. (2021), where it's just a passing mention (conversely, it also gets referred to as P. atavus in passing in other papers, i.e., Zverkov et al. (2022)). Therefore, given that P. atavus generally seems to have wider acceptance than C. atavus, and is used by two different sets of authors focusing on this species (or at least something very similar), I think it would be pertinent to merge our Contectopalatus article into the Phalarodon article (which, of additional note, has already been written treating Contectopalatus as a synonym of Phalarodon. --Slate Weasel [Talk - Contribs] 22:24, 28 December 2023 (UTC)