The trouble with flippers: a report on the prevalence of digital anomalies in Cetacea
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The forelimbs of cetaceans (whales, dolphins, and porpoises) are unique among mammals as the digits exhibit hyperphalangy, and the entire limb is encased in a soft tissue flipper that functions to generate lift. The typical morphology of cetacean digits has been well documented by detailed anatomical studies. This study however furthers our understanding of cetacean forelimb anatomy by conducting a taxonomically broad survey of cetacean digital anomalies. Forelimb radiographs from museum collections provided the basis upon which we calculated the prevalence and documented the morphology of cetacean digital abnormalities. Results indicated that 11% (n = 255) of toothed whales displayed some type of aberrant ossification: the majority of these cases displayed a fusion of elements within a single digital ray, whereas cases exhibiting branched digits were rare. A small sample of baleen whale radiographs (n = 6) contained the only documented case of baleen whale polydactyly in a specimen of the gray whale (Eschrichtius). Furthermore, some Balaenoptera specimens displayed ossified elements within the interdigital spaces that lacked attachment to the adjacent digits and carpus. In addition, we speculated on the role that several genes may have played in creating cetacean digital anomalies.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".