High diversity in late Early Cretaceous ichthyosaurs part II: The Cambridge Greensand material
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recent and on-going work on Canadian and French Cretaceous ichthyosaurs has unveiled a high diversity of Albian ophthalmosaurids, suggesting the extinction of ichthyosaurs which occurs during the Cenomanian was a much more severe event than previously supposed. Yet the ichthyosaur assemblages from other areas such as the USA and Australia are monospecific, suggesting that the diversity of ichthyosaurs was not universally high.The Cambridge Greensand ichthyosaur material, which has not been the subject of any thorough study since 1869, consists of about 900 specimens, the vast majority of which are isolated bones. Nevertheless, this abundant material offers a good opportunity to assess the diversity of the ichthyosaurs that roamed the western England Sea during the late Albian–Early Cenomanian interval. In order to assess this diversity, diagnostic bones such as basioccipitals, stapes, humeri and femora were compared to that of other ophthalmosaurids. Several morphotypes, some represented by 10+ specimens are recognized. Articulated specimens were used to unite cranial and appendicular bone morphotypes to a taxon. An extremely diverse assemblage of at least 5 distinct taxa is recognized in the Cambridge Greensand Formation: <i>Platypterygius</i> sp., two new genera that have representatives in southeastern France and Germany, a <i>Brachypterygius/Aegirosaurus</i> morphotype, and the long-forgotten but diagnostic <i>Cetarthrosaurus walker</i>, for which we found a second and better preserved specimen. The diversity of the ‘mid’ Cretaceous ichthyosaurs from Europe now matches that of the Early Jurassic, a period sometimes seen as the ‘Golden Age’ of post-Triassic ichthyosaurs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".