"Without a leg to stand on": on the evolution and development of axial elongation and limblessness in tetrapods
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A review of the osteology of the axial and appendicular skeleton of fossil and extant tetrapods, in the context of tetrapod phylogenetic patterns, reveals common patterns of limb loss and axial elongation. A threshold number of 3540 presacral vertebrae is linked to minor reductions in digit number and the phalangeal count. Presacral vertebral counts do not increase gradually, rather, presacral counts jump from 3540 to 6070. At this point, limb loss is extreme, with forelimbs being reduced to tiny appendages or lost altogether. Higher presacral counts (>90) are linked to total forelimb loss and radical rear-limb reductions culminating in total loss. A pattern of this sort is recognized in Paleozoic lepospondyls and Mesozoic to modern squamates. Developmental genetic models illuminate gene systems that are associated with morphogenesis and are linked to the evolution of limb reduction and leglessness in these tetrapods.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".