Establishing a fossil record for the perianthless Piperales: <i>Saururus tuckerae</i> sp. nov. (Saururaceae) from the Middle Eocene Princeton Chert
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Investigations of small permineralized flowers from the Middle Eocene Princeton Chert, British Columbia, Canada have revealed that they represent an extinct species of Saururus. Over 100 flowers and one partial inflorescence were studied, and numerous minute perianthless flowers are borne in an indeterminate raceme. Each flower is subtended by a bract, and flowers and bracts are borne at the end of a common stalk. Five stamens are basally adnate to the carpels. Pollen is frequently found in situ in the anthers. Examined under SEM and TEM, pollen grains are minute (6-11 μm), monosulcate, boat-shaped-elliptic, with punctate sculpturing and a granulate aperture membrane. The gynoecium is composed of four basally connate, lobed carpels with recurved styles and a single ovule per carpel. Flower structure and pollen are indicative of Saururaceae (Piperales), and in phylogenetic analyses using morphological characters, the fossils are sister to extant Saururus. The fossil flowers are described here as Saururus tuckerae sp. nov. These fossil specimens add to the otherwise sparse fossil record of Piperales, represent the oldest fossils of Saururaceae as well as the first North American fossil specimens of this family, and provide the first evidence of saururaceous pollen in the fossil record.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 | 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".