Talk:Male Ginkgo

Um, why has the origin of this Flower been changed from Pliocene to Jurassic? It seems mildly pointless and only leaves us open for a wrangle about the specific identity of fossil Ginkgo material from the Mesozoic versus the Cenozoic and the Evolutionary Species Concept. If you have a reason, please let me know and we can talk about it. Otherwise, can we change it back? While I'm aware that the Jurassic material is morphologically very similar to Recent G. biloba, the intervening millions of years (the base of the Pliocene is 5.3mya, whereas the base of the Jurassic is 199mya) would seem to make it unlikely at best that, if we had living examples of plants from both times, they would be considered identical by a taxonomist.

Clearly, it's not *really* that important, in the grand scheme of things, but the point is that changing from one mildly arbitrary but reasonably logical time period to another also arbitrary but less logical time period with NO reason and NO explanation is ... both irritating and petty. So. Can I have an explanation, please? Agenttrojie 22:43, 21 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Isn't the point that the ginkgo is a living fossil? The Wiki article seems to be explicitely drawing the link between the Jurassic and current plants. Huinesoron 09:16, 22 May 2009 (UTC)
 * The term 'living fossil' is ... argh. As the wiki article on the term states, a 'living fossil' *appears* to be the same species. The problem here is largely on which definition of 'species' you're using, as well. Fossil species are determined based on morphology. They are therefore known as 'morphospecies'. However there is currently much pulling of beards going on over how closely morphospecies correlate to molecular species, or to biological species (that is, species defined by the Biological Species Concept, which states that two organisms that can breed to produce viable, fertile offspring are the same species), and ... well, it's controversial. So my solution, upon thinking about it, would actually be to scrap assigning it to a geological time period and just say that its origins are China of World One, thus neatly removing any fretting about morphospecies validity. Admittedly it would only be me fretting, but oh well. Thoughts? Agenttrojie 22:05, 22 May 2009 (UTC)