Cranial anatomy and variation in<i>Prosaurolophus maximus</i>(Dinosauria: Hadrosauridae)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Prosaurolophus maximus Brown is a saurolophine hadrosaurid known from numerous complete, articulated skulls from the Dinosaur Park Formation (Campanian, Alberta, Canada) that range in size by approximately half a metre in total skull length. Therefore, it is an important taxon for understanding patterns of growth and variation in saurolophines. This study describes the cranial anatomy of P. maximus from the type locality of Dinosaur Provincial Park (Dinosaur Park Formation: Campanian) on the basis of ten articulated skulls, quantitatively examines its range of osteological variation, and provides the first hypothesized ontogenetic series for this taxon. A second species, Prosaurolophus blackfeetensis Horner, was named on the basis of geologically younger material from Montana (Two Medicine Formation: Campanian) that is diagnosed by putative morphological differences in the nasal crest. However, considerable nasal crest variation in the sample from the Dinosaur Park Formation does not permit quantitative differentiation of P. blackfeetensis from P. maximus. Furthermore, a species-level phylogenetic analysis of saurolophines that includes both P. maximus and P. blackfeetensis as originally defined recovers them as sister taxa that do not differ morphologically in the character matrix. Based on both the morphometric and phylogenetic data, this study supports the hypothesis that P. blackfeetensis is a junior synonym of P. maximus, thereby substantially increasing its temporal range to 1.6 million years, and a concomitant period of morphological stasis in this taxon.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".