Estimating body mass from silhouettes: testing the assumption of elliptical body cross-sections
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
In computational studies of the body mass and surface area of vertebrates, it is customary to assume that body cross-sections are approximately elliptical. However, a review of actual vertebrate cross-sections establishes that this assumption is not usually met. A new cross-sectional model using superellipses is therefore introduced, together with a scheme that allows estimates to be given with ranges. Tests of the new method, using geometrical shapes, miniature vertebrate models, and actual animals, show that the method has a high accuracy in body mass estimation. A new computer program to perform the computation is introduced. The application of the method to some Mesozoic marine reptiles suggests that the tuna-shaped ichthyosaur Stenopterygius probably had body masses comparable to those of average cetaceans of the same body length.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 it