Talk:Mustelidea

Deletion debate

The following information has failed Wiktionary's deletion process.

It should not be re-entered without careful consideration.

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I don't think this is common enough to be a common misspelling of the taxonomic name Mustelidae (47/81,000 ~ 0.05%) at Google Books. I don't see how it can be called an alternative spelling. DCDuring TALK 19:52, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

Actually looks like a typo, accidentally inverting the last two letters, delete. Mglovesfun (talk) 20:33, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia page seems to be Musteloidea, seems to be a typo from musteloid that's been propagated. Mglovesfun (talk) 22:59, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

and -oidea is a superfamily, one level above an -idae, a family. Based on citations, we should have Musteloidea (Wikispecies doesn't have this) as well as Mustelidae and Mustela and mustela. But, yes, that kind of thing makes for typos and typesetting errors.

This probably should just be moved to Musteloidea, once the misspelling/alt spelling is decided, to give us the missing entry with just a little adjustment work. DCDuring TALK 23:36, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

Zoological names above genus in rank are formed by removing the ending from the genitive singular of the name of the type genus, and adding an ending specific to the rank (though the ICZN doesn't cover orders and related ranks, or above, so there are lots of exceptions). -oidea is the standard ending for a superfamily. Before this system was formalized, taxonomists would use their own idiosyncratic endings, so there's a possibility this is one of those that never caught on- but it certainly looks like a straightforward error for Mustelidae. As for what Wikispecies has: they're governed by whether a name is taxonomically correct, but we're governed by whether it is, or has been, in use. Also, they don't show all possible taxonomic levels unless they mean something- ranks such as suborder, infraorder, subfamily, tribe, subtribe, etc. theoretically exist, but are left out to avoid clutter. Chuck Entz (talk) 16:00, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

The creator of this entry created it with links to Wikipedia and Wikispecies so clearly though they existed, but neither of these pages exist (or ever have done) so I think it is safe to assume a typo and the entry should be moved. SemperBlotto is still an active editor so we could simply ask him what he meant. SpinningSpark 17:26, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

Looks like a spelling mistake. There are 32 Google book hits for (deprecated template usage) Mustelidea, but 81,000 for (deprecated template usage) Mustelidae.SemperBlotto (talk) 18:10, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

• Deleted. —Ruakh_TALK 16:00, 30 January 2013 (UTC)