Redescription of the holotype of <i>Platecarpus tympaniticus</i> Cope, 1869 (Mosasauridae: Plioplatecarpinae), and its implications for the alpha taxonomy of the genus
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The fragmentary holotype and only known material of Platecarpus tympaniticus CitationCope, 1869, is redescribed and compared to other closely related plioplatecarpine mosasaurs. Re-characterization of the holotype reveals the following similarities to Platecarpus ictericus: exoccipital-basioccipital suture transversely oriented in condylar view; basal tubera not inflated and widely separated along ventral midline; cervical intervertebral joint surface strongly curved; seventh cervical vertebra lacking articulating intercentrum (i.e., hypapophyseal peduncle). In addition, the relatively complete right quadrate of the holotype of P. tympaniticus is virtually indistinguishable from those of P. ictericus. Quadrate characters, when combined with the four previously mentioned characters, uniquely diagnose both P. tympaniticus and P. ictericus among known mosasaur taxa. Because P. tympaniticus was established before P. ictericus, the former becomes the specific senior synonym of the latter, and is also the generic type of Platecarpus.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".