Talk:Macroscelides micus

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A news item involving Macroscelides micus was featured on Wikipedia's Main Page in the In the news section on 29 June 2014.

Any intention to nominate this for DYK if it doesn't manage ITN ? Hooks should be quite easy... --

Yes, although passing ITN is fairly likely based on previously mammal discoveries. --ThaddeusB (talk) 21:16, 28 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Right you are, and probably just as well, since all of the hooks I had in mind, contained elephant-sized amounts of sensationalism :) --

talk) 16:12, 30 June 2014 (UTC)[reply

]

הסרפד (call me Hasirpad) 21:08, 29 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The rule with this sort of news seems to be that a press release comes out just before publication of the paper. The press release is generally (as in this case) more conservative than the tabloids, but because it is incomplete and the journalists not very good with the science there is a potential for them to play a bit of a game of telephone with the data, especially as the competition for shares seems to push third parties (editors) into putting ever wilder titles onto even the newspaper's version of the tale.

That said, I was actually kind of assuming that the long nose and perhaps insectivore feeding was an ancestral trait, but I don't know and it seemed too far afield to research it for this article. I ought to see what I can do to figure that out for Afrotheria, now that you point it out... meanwhile, it is always a good thing that we find sources for something before we put it in. :) Wnt (talk) 21:27, 29 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Finally, an article that analyzes some of the hype: [1] הסרפד (call me Hasirpad) 15:54, 30 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Being somewhat inexperienced with the subject, I will not make the suggested changes myself, but I think M. micus should be added to the following list articles:

• List of mammals described in 21st century
• Primates described in the 2010s
  —perhaps the list should be split?)

הסרפד (call me Hasirpad) 22:13, 29 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

"about 7.3 inches (19 cm) long and weighing less than an ounce (28 grams)..."

"7.3 inches" matches the source but that would be one long, skinny shrew. And there are many shrews much shorter. The decimal maybe indicates these should be metric units... Doprendek (talk) 00:21, 30 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The original article indeed says (p. 448): "... average ... adult length of 186 mm ... adult body mass of 26.9 g ....". The pictures (p. 449) should give you the idea. הסרפד (call me Hasirpad) 00:37, 30 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

P.S. To the content writers: why is the full article (http://www.asmjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1644/13-MAMM-A-159), linked above, not linked from the article, which only links to a DOI, where one gets obstructed by a paywall? הסרפד (call me Hasirpad) 00:37, 30 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@הסרפד: Because of this edit by WolfmanSF, which removed my link to the good URL. I don't know what he was thinking but this really ticks me off. My impression of DOI is a hairsbreadth above a commercial scam - like URLs, they stop working when someone stops paying, but unlike URLs, I don't know of many options to get around it when they do. So it's really important to me to have all that other information even when the DOI doesn't point at a paywall. Wnt (talk) 01:11, 30 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Correction: it's weirder than that. He actually had a template for this at Template:Cite doi/10.1644.2F13-MAMM-A-159. I shudder to think of how many separate little pages like this Wikipedia may have floating around... anyway, he didn't have the link but at least he did have the other fields specified by this indirect mechanism. I still don't think much of DOI, even if Wikipedia is "pirating" some of their records this way. Wnt (talk) 01:14, 30 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Those templates are made automatically when one adds {{Cite doi|blablabla... to an article. Abductive (reasoning) 01:40, 30 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The length includes the tail, so the actual body is probably more like 4 in. --ThaddeusB (talk) 01:28, 30 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Indeed, the average length of the tail is given as 90 mm, so 186 − 90 = 96 mm: roughly 4 inches. הסרפד (call me Hasirpad) 02:04, 30 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

For anyone's interest: a recently published open access paper (source of the 2 images I added). Enjoy~ 23:30, 10 October 2015 (UTC)

• Rathbun, Galen B.; Dumbacher, John P. (2015). "Home range and use of diurnal shelters by the Etendeka round-eared sengi, a newly discovered Namibian endemic desert mammal". PeerJ. 3: e1302.
  doi:10.7717/peerj.1302.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: unflagged free DOI (link
  )