The "Great Extinction" that never happened: the demise of the dinosaurs considered
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The concept of a sudden extinction of the dinosaurs, consequent upon the impact of some extraterrestrial object, is so dramatic that it has taken hold upon the imaginations of many scientists, as well as of the general public. The evidence for an impact, at approximately the level of the CretaceousTertiary boundary, is impressive. Whether it was the cause for the iridium concentrations, so widely distributed at that level, remains disputable. The wave of extinctions, so often attributed to the impact, is equally disputable. It is now evident that no clear line can be drawn between the smaller theropod dinosaurs and the birds. In that sense, the dinosaurs are not extinct. The dating of the extinction of the larger saurischians and of the ornithischians, based as it is upon evidence from only one small corner of the globe, is equally disputable. Whenever it happened, that extinction appears to have been the product of natural causes a slow decline, occasioned by environmental changes, and not an extraterrestrially induced catastrophe. Whether the impact had any effect at all upon the dinosaurs is questionable; if so, it appears to have been not worldwide, but confined to a limited region of the Americas.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| 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 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".