<i>Albertonectes vanderveldei</i>, a new elasmosaur (Reptilia, Sauropterygia) from the Upper Cretaceous of Alberta
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT A new elasmosaurid plesiosaur, Albertonectes vanderveldei, gen. et sp. nov., is described on the basis of an almost complete postcranial skeleton from the upper Campanian, Bearpaw Formation in Alberta, Canada. The new taxon is distinguished by a unique set of characters—76 cervicals, lateral longitudinal ridge on posterior-most cervicals, relatively wide clavicular arch, tapered ventral projection at the median symphysis of coracoids, pointed anterolateral projection of pubis, fused posterior-most caudal vertebrae, and a relatively slender humerus. Ninety-seven chert gastroliths were also recovered with the specimen, and their mean diameters range from <1 to 13.5 cm. Shape analysis indicates that most of the gastroliths were ingested in the vicinity of a beach environment. Evidence that the carcass was scavenged by sharks includes a tooth-marked coracoid, two shed Squalicorax sp. teeth, and small, localized disruptions to the skeleton. Preliminary phylogenetic analysis confirms the inclusion of Albertonectes in a clade comprised of ‘middle’ to Late Cretaceous, long-necked elasmosaurid plesiosaurs. The number of cervical vertebrae associated with different elasmosaur genera does not show any correlation with phylogeny. Both neck and total body length of Albertonectes are the longest among known elasmosaurs, and highlight the morphological extremes attained by this group of plesiosaurs.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".