Aquatic adaptation, cranial kinesis, and the skull of the mosasaurine mosasaur<i>Plotosaurus bennisoni</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
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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 | 0.000 | 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) | 0.001 | 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".