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Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
From the Paleobiology Database (as per the references), I note:
1. Oldest specimen - collection 16626: date range 46.2 - 40.4 Ma
2. Youngest specimen - collection 17492: date range 30.8 - 20.4 Ma
So, I would say that the oldest specimen was 43.3 +/- 2.9 Ma, and the youngest was 25.6 +/- 5.2. Surely quoting without showing the error margin would be highly misleading?
Ignoring the uncertainties, the references seem to support dates of 43.3 Ma & 25.6 Ma for the oldest and youngest specimens. Yet the article seems to suggest that both the oldest and the earliest specimens have a range of 42.5 Ma - 31 mya! Clearly there is an error here; the dates/date ranges shouldn't be the same (as the fossils are clearly from different epochs) and there is no obvious connection between the figures used and those in the cited reference material.
Elsewhere in the article, it mentions that the oldest Hesperocyon fossil dates to 39.74 mya (the reference actually says 39.74 Ma +/- 0.07 myr - why is this level of accuracy 2-3 orders of magnitude better than that used by the database?), which plainly disagrees with the very first paragraph of the article.
Finally, the article jumps from using Ma to mya and back again continuously. There doesn't seem to be a difference - the article states that the genus was around for 11.5 million years (= 42.5 Ma - 31 mya) - so why not just choose one and stick with it throughout the whole article?Glevum (talk) 20:35, 18 May 2014 (UTC)Reply
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