Talk:Rail (bird)

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Leave the picture for the moment, Adrian - I'll attend to that shortly by finding a tall, narrow picture to replace it with Tannin 08:59 8 Jul 2003 (UTC)

There's a stub tag on this article, when the wikiproject bird tag says its been rated as a start class article. Canadianshoper 17:18, 15 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

In my section of the USA (Northeast), and in general in the northern US and in México, the most common rail seems to be the Virginia Rail. Why, then, is this species not mentioned in the article? David spector (talk) 21:04, 2 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

There are forty genera, and 142 species, found all over the world. A number of common and rare NA species are in the article, but not every species can get mentioned. In articles about families and other higher level taxa, mentions of individual species are often in the context of illustrative examples (Takahe = example of flightless species, Clapper Rail = example of long-billed species).Sabine's Sunbird talk 22:08, 2 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia does have a page on the Virginia rail] Abote2 (talk) 21:10, 4 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

This sentence in Rail (bird)#Flight and flightlessness seems to be garbled: "In examining the phylogeny of G. philippensis, although the species is clearly polyphyletic, it is not the ancestor of most of its flightless descendants, revealing that the flightless condition evolved in rails before speciation was complete." How can it not be the ancestor of its descendants?

Anyway, I'm adding a gloss on "polyphyletic", as it is very technical. New sentence (not much better): "In examining the phylogeny of G. philippensis, although the species is clearly polyphyletic (it has more than one ancestral species), it is not the ancestor of most of its flightless descendants, revealing that the flightless condition evolved in rails before speciation was complete." Zaslav (talk) 21:07, 11 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Where does it fit in the cladogram? 104.153.40.58 (talk) 16:13, 19 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

""The family Rallidae was introduced (as Rallia) by the French polymath Constantine Samuel Rafinesque in 1815.[31][32] The family has traditionally been grouped with two families of larger birds, the cranes and bustards, as well as several smaller families of usually "primitive" midsized amphibious birds, to make up the order Gruiformes. The alternative Sibley-Ahlquist taxonomy, which has been widely accepted in America, raises the family to ordinal level as the Ralliformes. Given uncertainty about gruiform monophyly, this may or may not be correct; it certainly seems more justified than most of the Sibley-Ahlquist proposals."

There _has_ to be a less inflammatory way of saying this. Not knowing the status of the taxonomy variations being discussed, I'd rather not take the chance of fixing it. Is this reasonable, though? "The Sibley-Ahlquist taxonomy, on the other hand, raises the group(clade? I feel that repeating family here is argumentative given what comes after: maybe not if it's changed) to ordinal level as the Ralliformes. Though this has become widely accepted in America, uncertainty about gruiform monophyly prevent it from being adopted everywhere."

I can't just drop that it there, given that I don't know how standard the Sibley-Ahlquist taxonomy is in America or anywhere else, or whether my restatement introduces some distortion of its own. But seriously, the current language reads like a blind item in a gossip column.````LucyKemnitzer — Preceding unsigned comment added by Lucy Kemnitzer (talk • contribs) 04:24, 9 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]