A new parareptile with temporal fenestration from the Middle Permian of South Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The partial skeleton of a small reptile, from the Middle Permian Tapinocephalus Assemblage Zone of South Africa, is described as a new parareptile. Australothyris smithi gen. et sp. nov. is diagnosed by contact between the postfrontal and the supratemporal, a relatively large pineal foramen, a small interpterygoid vacuity, the presence of teeth on the ventral surfaces of the basipterygoid processes, and several other autapomorphies. Phylogenetic analysis of an augmented data matrix from the literature positions A. smithi basally within Parareptilia, as the sister taxon of Ankyramorpha. Our results indicate that the presence of a lateral temporal fenestra is synapomorphic for procolophonomorphs (as regarded in this paper) and that this structure was variously modified in procolophonians. Australothyris smithi is the phylogenetically youngest member of a grade of Gondwanan parareptiles that includes mesosaurids and millerosaurs, a topology intimating that parareptiles diversified first in Gondwana and then dispersed into Laurasia. This biogeographic scenario is at odds with observations that the bolosaurids of Laurasia predate mesosaurids and other Gondwanan parareptiles by approximately 15 million years.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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".