Aquatic adaptation, cranial kinesis, and the skull of the mosasaurine mosasaur<i>Plotosaurus bennisoni</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
New anatomical observations of the holotype skull of Plotosaurus bennisoni from the Maastrichtian Moreno Formation of California, U.S.A., are used as a framework to examine cranial kinesis in derived members of the Mosasaurinae. Enlarged posteromedial flanges of the frontal and extensive lateral contacts of the prefrontal and postorbitofrontal contributed to increased rigidity along the frontoparietal suture (the mesokinetic joint). Sutural contacts of the parietal with the supraoccipital posteriorly and the prootic ventrally would have restricted metakinetic movements. Furthermore, the unusual shape of the epipterygoid, and its dorsal contact with the prootic and parietal, shows that the epipterygoid and pterygoid were probably not capable of anteroposterior movements. Most strikingly, Plotosaurus exhibits a tight association of the quadrate with the temporal arcade, suggesting that streptostyly was limited or lost in this derived mosasaurine, the loss of such a feature having never been described in a mosasaur. These charcteristics are placed in a functional context to examine aquatic adaptations in mosasaurs. As one of the most specialized mosasaurs known, the loss of cranial kinesis may have evolved as a result of its piscivorous diet.
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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".