Pelagic neonatal fossils support viviparity and precocial life history of <scp>C</scp>retaceous mosasaurs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Mosasaurs were large marine squamates that inhabited all of the world's oceans during the Late Cretaceous. Their success as apex predators has been attributed to their rapid acquisition of aquatic adaptations, which allowed them to become fully pelagic. However, little is known about the breeding biology of derived, flipper‐bearing mosasaurs, as the record of neonatal mosasaur fossils is extremely sparse. Here, we report on the fragmentary cranial remains of two neonatal mosasaurs from the Niobrara Formation, referred to Clidastes sp. Comparison with other preliminary reports of neonatal mosasaurs reveals that these specimens are among the smallest individuals ever found and certainly represent the smallest known Clidastes specimens. The recovery of these extremely young specimens from a pelagic setting indicates that even neonatal mosasaurs occupied open oceanic habitats and were likely born in this setting. These data shed new light on the ecology of neonatal mosasaurs and illustrate the degree to which size‐related taphonomic and collection biases have influenced our understanding of the early life history of these iconic marine reptiles.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".