Talk:Amphicyon

Untitled

The illustration is not correct. The animal shown is actually Sarkastodon.

Size of Amphicyon ingins?

<quote>A. ingens was much bigger: Sorkin (2008) estimated the largest known specimen (AM 68108) to weigh 600 kg,</quote> This is somewhat inconsistent with the sentence "Amphicyonids were as small as 5 kilograms (11 lb) and as large as 100 to 200 kilograms (220 to 440 lb) and evolved from wolf-like to bear-like" in http://en.wiki.x.io/wiki/Amphicyonid — Preceding unsigned comment added by JAbelCarvalho (talk • contribs) 16:53, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

Fixed.--Mr Fink (talk) 17:29, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

Adding new Pics

Im having a bit of trouble adding a pic of the animal to the page. (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 03:28, 13 April 2011 (UTC).

Time range

Is the time range accurate? It seems too much for a single genus to exist for 12 million years and that most of the species seemed to appear at about the same time and in the same place, regarding the North american ones; A. galushai 20.6mya, 440,000 years after appears A. frendes, 100,000 years forward A. ingens, and all three coexisting for at least 4 million years, or there's an error there or is just another case of lumping of prehistoric mammal species. Mike.BRZ (talk) 05:41, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

Firstly, there is no cutoff time for a genus to die out: if circumstances are favorable, a genus can persist for a long geological time. Secondly, we need more information about the Eurasian species.--Mr Fink (talk) 06:05, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

I know there's no cutoff line but then a momment is reached where a species is different enough to warrant it's own genus, anyway, that wasn't the my main gripe I can understand that it could of lasted that long, the origin of my confusion is how close together are the North american species in time and space and that they coexisted for so long. I better find a way to read the papers. Mike.BRZ (talk) 16:47, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

One place worth starting at is Jordi Agusti's book, Mammoths, Sabertooths, and Hominids: 65 Million Years of Mammalian Evolution in Europe.--Mr Fink (talk) 17:03, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

I'll do it, thanks, but I think I found the origin of it, the time range comes from the Paleobiology Database right? well, they don't give the time range for the species, but the time stage in which the fossils are located, all remains for A. galushai come from the Burdigalian which ranges from 20.43-15.97mya, one of A. ingens dates to the same stage, while the rest come from the Langhian (15.97-13.65mya), is the same with A. frendens. We have it here as if the genus lasted all 6.8 million years in North America but that isn't the case, that is the combined time lapse of the two stages where the fossils have been found. I wonder if the original descriptions give more exact dating because using the Paleobiology Database to get the time range of species gives a large margin of error.Mike.BRZ (talk) 17:24, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

Ok, after getting my hands on the 2006 paper by Sorkin and checking the references in this article again I'm kind of baffled, the problems I mentioned were all the fault of referencing the Paleobiology Database, we even had referenced Hunt(2003) which had the temporal range of all the american species, there was no interlap at all and yet no one removed the erroneous PB references, that paper, a book I just referenced and the papaer from B. Sorkin of 2006 of the body mass of A. ingens have enough information to improve this article considerably, I'll do it but I don't have time, so maybe I'll start on December if no one else is interested. Mike.BRZ (talk) 21:33, 10 November 2012 (UTC)