A conifer-dominated palynological assemblage from Pennsylvanian (late Moscovian) alluvial drylands in Atlantic Canada: implications for the vegetation of tropical lowlands during glacial phases
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: New research suggests that Pennsylvanian Coal Forests were commonly replaced by conifer-dominated vegetation during seasonally dry glacial phases. Here we describe palynological assemblages from stacked sequences of the Middle Pennsylvanian (late Moscovian) Sydney Mines Formation of Nova Scotia, Canada, which lends some support to this hypothesis. One critical sample from a widespread redbed succession below the Harbour Coal is dominated by conifer pollen (55%), together with abundant representatives of cordaitaleans, other coniferopsids, and rare pteridosperms, ferns and lepidodendrids. It differs markedly from 13 other samples obtained from coals, their roof shale–limestone and associated channel bodies, which are dominated by lepidodendrids, marattialean tree-ferns, cordaitaleans and/or calamiteans. The latter beds represent coastal wetlands, and are attributed to late transgressive and highstand systems tracts, whereas the conifer-bearing sample represents a dryland alluvial plain and may be attributed to lowstand or earliest transgressive systems tracts. Three additional samples from grey shale below a sequence boundary (late highstand) and between a redbed succession and major coal seam (early to mid-transgressive deposits) contain transitional palynofloras with a high proportion of herbaceous gleicheniaceous and sphenopteroid ferns, herbaceous lycopsids, and sphenophylls interspersed with cordaitaleans and/or lepidodendrids. The dominance of conifer pollen within the dryland components of well-defined sequences, which have been linked to relative sea-level change promoted by Gondwanan glaciation, supports the view that Pennsylvanian tropical biomes responded to the beat of glacial–interglacial cycles.
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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 | 0.001 | 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".