The ichnogenus<i>Tubotomaculum</i>: an enigmatic pellet-filled structure from Upper Cretaceous to Miocene deep-marine deposits of southern Spain
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The trace-fossil name Tubotomaculum has been extensively used to refer to spindle-shaped pellet-filled tubes present in Upper Cretaceous to Miocene deep-marine deposits of the western Mediterranean region. However, it has never been formally diagnosed, and accordingly it was regarded as a nomen nudum . In this paper, we formally introduce the ichnogenus Tubotomaculum , including the new ichnospecies Tubotomaculum mediterranensis . Bioglyphs, represented by scratch traces that may be present on the basal and lateral surfaces of the structure, suggesting production by crustaceans. The functional meaning of these structures challenges the simple model of a mining strategy. Instead, the storing of pellets to use them as a bacteria-enriched resource during times when organic detritus was scarce is suggested. The association with chemoautothrophic bacteria in modern analogs of Tubotomaculum provides a crucial piece of evidence to support the cache model. Integration of information from modern environments and the fossil record points to a connection between Tubotomaculum , mud volcanism, fluid venting, and hydrocarbon seeps. The presence of bioglyphs suggests firmgrounds that may have resulted from bottom current scouring of the sea sediment, leading to erosional exhumation of previously buried compacted sediment, which was therefore available for colonization by the infauna. However, an alternative scenario involves enriched fluids related to mud-volcanism resulting in reducing conditions that favored carbonate precipitation and nodule formation just a few centimeters below the sediment-water interface.
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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) | 0.001 | 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".