Talk:Dromornis

Feeding

Is it possible that Dromornis feed almost exclusively on the nestlings of colony nesting birds, for example pelicans during some periods of the year and on ratites like the emu during dry seasons? Their hoof like feet would come in to good use only in hot sand and coarse grass/brush but would limit their locomotion in muddy marshes but not seasonally flooded grasslands. The massive bill and head structures may also have had a function in the dispatching of monitor lizards and snakes. The shield like bills of the gallinules and hornbills come to mind. Gallinules forage on animals as do hornbills. Ground Hornbills may be similar in some ecological aspects with Dromornis. But the size of the body suggests to me that during the wet seasons the species lived as a semi aquatic species. Perhaps its chicks were reared in flooded grasslands much in the same manner as Rheas.

Size

Question: Is it certain the Dromornis was the largest? The largest variety of Moa was up to 3m, so maybe some sort of comparison would be good? JD

Discovered by?

who was the first to know about these animals? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.137.7.0 (talk) 23:31, 18 February 2010 (UTC)

Should Bullockornis merge to this page?

Fossilworks and some papers refers Bullockornis as Dromornis planei. I wonder whether the page should be merged?

Fossilworks is unreliable. We need to examine what the current scientific consensus is. As for merging, the Dromornis species have been split off into separate pages for some reason, though this is not common practice for prehistoric species. FunkMonk (talk) 08:24, 20 November 2019 (UTC)

The synonymy was proposed by Nguyen et al. (2010), although they note that some material referred to Bullockornis sp. is probably distinct. A search on Google Scholar of papers on dromornithids mentioning planei since 2015 shows that all recent usages by workers in the area place the species under Dromornis, so I think it's not a minority opinion. Lythronaxargestes (talk | contribs) 04:57, 21 November 2019 (UTC)

Then should Bullockornis be an independent page or merge? — Preceding unsigned comment added by PrehistoricBirdLover (talk • contribs) 03:31, 6 December 2019 (UTC)

As it stands now, the merger of Bullockornis into Dromornis as D. planei is commonly accepted in the paleo literature, so I agree it should be merged along with the other two species articles that currently exist.--Kevmin § 15:42, 4 May 2021 (UTC)

Merge of species

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

To merge Dromornis australis into Dromornis given the usual practice on extinct taxa, to remove duplication and add context. Klbrain (talk) 10:50, 22 October 2022 (UTC)

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Per the discussion above, and as noted by @FunkMonk: on the individual species pages, the three stand along articles Bullockornis, Dromornis stirtoni and Dromornis australis, should be rolled into this article per WP:Paleo guidelines, and to avoid information redundancies.

• Support - Per above.--Kevmin § 15:42, 4 May 2021 (UTC)

Ah, if the case for Bullockornis is clearer now, it should be merged too. It of course might be possible to make fully expanded articles about these species, but as it stands, they consist of mostly duplicated or unsourced material. Anything else can easily fit in the genus page. FunkMonk (talk) 15:47, 4 May 2021 (UTC) FunkMonk (talk) 15:47, 4 May 2021 (UTC)

• Oppose, again: previous merge/delete. ~ cygnis insignis 16:41, 4 May 2021 (UTC)

• Note: I made a request for Bullockornis to be moved to the species title, fwiw. 18:58, 4 May 2021 (UTC)

At that point there was not consensus NOT to merge the two, and WP paleo guidelines are pretty clear on this situation.--Kevmin § 20:51, 4 May 2021 (UTC)

Feh, those guidelines have morphed to retroactively justify ignoring site-wide policies with handwaving about redundancy and genera being the "basic unit of taxonomy", it is not a basis for the multitude of unannounced unilateral 'merging's to genus articles. I added another project above. One of these species is the "largest flightless bird ever to have walked the earth", kinda notable, there is plenty to expand the rest (if it is not clipped off as too much detail in the muddled mess of general facts). ~ cygnis insignis 21:50, 4 May 2021 (UTC)

• Another note. Amongst other things, I added a merge notice to the newly created article at Dromornis murrayi. ~ cygnis insignis 13:41, 5 May 2021 (UTC)
• also the mergefrom template that completes the formalities. So far, I'm finding it is this genus article that contains information that should be at other articles. ~ cygnis insignis 15:59, 5 May 2021 (UTC)
• I've expanded the articles to something beyond a start class, attempting to preserve content created by others where possible. If requested I can indicate where I think the articles might be expanded, but I am reluctant to do much more because these articles may be converted to redirects with or without further discussion. It is made clear that these creations and expansions are contravening a rule, which I regard as one project's guideline, all can I do is try to demonstrate this again (and find out a lot about mihirungs in the process). ~ cygnis insignis 22:05, 18 May 2021 (UTC)

• Support in the case of extinct taxa, you need to be able to demonstrate there is a large amount of research on each individual species like with Mammuthus or Homo, otherwise each species article will be forced to clone all nearly all the info from the other species to get a full picture of what the animal looked like, and you'll end up with several mostly identical articles. Considering each species is known from fragmentary remains, there will not be enough literature to justify splitting all the way to species level.   User:Dunkleosteus77 |push to talk  15:29, 19 May 2021 (UTC)
• Support I agree with the others' opinion that separate pages are not needed. We could just compile all of the information into a single page (Dromornis).Borophagus talk 14:07, 20 May 2021 (UTC)

• Why does this !vote link to some point about sock-puppets? ~ cygnis insignis 01:40, 21 May 2021 (UTC)

I didn't even know there was a link. Where is it? Borophagus talk 09:02, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

Borophagus, the talk page link in your signature is messed up. Lythronaxargestes (talk | contribs) 21:00, 25 May 2021 (UTC)

Somehow, I hadn't noticed that. I'll have to sort that out later. Thanks for pointing it out!Borophagus talk 09:01, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

• Support This guideline exists to prevent unnecessary content forks. Lythronaxargestes (talk | contribs) 14:59, 20 May 2021 (UTC)
• Support Combining all of the articles as they are currently would not go beyond 8000 words, and it is unlikely that they could do so with current literature. It is better to give a comprehensive treatment of Dromornis in one article. Hemiauchenia (talk) 15:56, 21 May 2021 (UTC)
• Support This article is too short for all of the available information there is about Dromornis, and I feel like referring to Dromornis planei as Bullockornis gives a false sense of validity to the name Bullockornis. As for what cygnis insignis mentioned about one of the species beign "largest flightless bird ever to have walked the earth" are you sure this is correct? To my knowledge that title would go to Vorombe titan, one of the elephant birds. Logosvenator wikiensis (talk) 00:18, 9 December 2021 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

  Y Merger complete. Klbrain (talk) 16:31, 22 October 2022 (UTC)

Regarding the Extinction Subsection of Dromornis

Hi there, I do not specialize in researching prehistoric birds, but I do research a lot on Cenezoic mammals in general (only majorly edited for Enhydriodon but I plan on expanding a lot of Cenezoic mammal pages in general in the near-far future), so I feel like I can chime in regarding a recent edit war on the extinction subsection from @103.49.5.53, Materialscientist, and Roundish: (I don't know how to properly tag an anonymous IP). I can definitely understand the intent behind the reversions of the anonymous IP, but I think the IP user has a point since Dromornis did not exist by the Pliocene let alone the Pleistocene unlike Genyornis. As cited by one source linked at the end of this sentence, Dromornis only existed during the late Miocene, the difference between it and Genyornis of the Pleistocene being that "D. stirtoni lived life in the slow lane, that is, it did not experience any selection pressure to grow quickly, something it shared with most large birds that lived on islands. As such, it took several years to reach adult body size and took only a few more years for skeletal maturation. This contrasts with G. newtoni, that lived in what may have been turbulent, stochastic times with unpredictability in terms of rainfall, available browse-forage, and so forth (e.g., Martin, 2006; McInerney et al., 2022), and these birds may have been under strong selection pressure to grow more rapidly to adult body size, after which skeletal maturity could occur more at a more leisurely pace (hence several more LAGs in the OCL)." It therefore does not make any sense to blame humans for the extinction of Dromornis because humans arrived during the late Pleistocene while Dromornis already went extinct before the Pliocene as opposed to Genyornis. Dromornis and Genyornis lived in two different time periods with different environments and competition. PrimalMustelid (talk) 18:15, 7 January 2023 (UTC)

To add on to this, none of the Pleistocene extinction sources in the Dromornis page mention Dromornis, only Genyornis since, again, only the latter existed in the Pleistocene. These sources are basically irrelevant to the extinction causes of Dromornis therefore. PrimalMustelid (talk) 18:19, 7 January 2023 (UTC)

References