The vertebrate fauna of the Upper Permian of Niger. V. The primitive temnospondyl<i>Saharastega moradiensis</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT The skull of the temnospondyl amphibian Saharastega moradiensis, from the Upper Permian Moradi Formation (Izégouandane Group, Izégouandane Basin) of northwestern Niger, is described in detail. Saharastega moradiensis is the most primitive known temnospondyl from Gondwana and possesses a combination of plesiomorphic and apomorphic character states, which suggest affinities with the Edopoidea, a clade of basal temnospondyls from the Upper Carboniferous and Lower Permian of Euramerica. These include the exclusion of the lacrimal from the orbital margin, the exclusion of the vomers and palatines from the interpterygoid vacuities, and the presence of an intertemporal ossification. Autapomorphies of the new taxon include the presence of narrow and elongated, transversely oriented nostrils; an extensive tongue-and-groove contact between the premaxillae and maxillae; tabulars that possess exceptionally large, laterally and ventrally directed ‘horns’; and an extraordinary ‘occipital plate’ that may be formed, at least in part, by a supraoccipital ossification. A phylogenetic analysis of select Paleozoic temnospondyls indicates that S. moradiensis is the sister taxon to the edopoids, represented in this analysis by Chenoprosopus and Edops. This suggests that S. moradiensis represents a late-surviving member of a clade that is the sister group of the Edopoidea. Members of this clade may have been restricted to equatorial northwest Africa during the Late Carboniferous and Early Permian, an area that was not affected by the extensive glaciation that covered much of southern Pangea.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".