Live birth in Cretaceous marine lizards (mosasauroids)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although live-bearing (viviparity) has evolved around 100 times within reptiles, evidence of it is almost never preserved in the fossil record. Here, we report viviparity in mosasauroids, a group of Cretaceous marine lizards. This is the only known fossil record of live-bearing in squamates (lizards and snakes), and might represent the oldest occurrence of the trait in this diverse group; it is also the only known fossil record of viviparity in reptiles other than ichthyosaurs. An exceptionally preserved gravid female of the aigialosaur Carsosaurus (a primitive mosasauroid) contains at least four advanced embryos distributed along the posterior two-thirds of the long trunk region (dorsal vertebrae 9-21). Their orientation suggests that they were born tail-first (the nostrils emerging last) to reduce the possibility of drowning, an adaptation shared with other highly aquatic amniotes such as cetaceans, sirenians and ichthyosaurs; the orientation of the embryos also suggests that they were not gut contents because swallowed prey are usually consumed head-first. One embryo is located within the pelvis, raising the possibility that the adult died during parturition. Viviparity in early medium-sized amphibious aigialosaurs may have freed them from the need to return to land to deposit eggs, and permitted the subsequent evolution of gigantic totally marine mosasaurs.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 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) | 0.002 | 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".