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
ABSTRACT The fragmentary holotype and only known material of Platecarpus tympaniticus Cope, 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 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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 |
| 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".