Taphonomy and ontogeny of a multibranched Ediacaran fossil: <i>Bradgatia</i> from the Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Rangeomorphs, an extinct group of Ediacaran organisms with a fractal architecture and modular construction, occur abundantly in the Mistaken Point assemblage (575–560 Ma) of the Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland. Bradgatia is represented by hundreds of specimens, collectively permitting analysis of its morphology, growth mode, and life habits. Bradgatia is a petalage that consists of a radial array of up to eight petals, each exhibiting up to four visible orders of rangeomorph branching. The taphonomy and ontogeny of Bradgatia are tightly linked by a change in preserved morphology, from juvenile I- to V-shaped specimens to larger U-shaped specimens, to the largest and ontogenetically oldest O-shaped specimens. Bradgatia probably maintained a constant number of petals that gradually spread out with age. The number of frondlets per petal does not correlate with length, suggesting either fractal or inflationary growth. Presence of a structure from which petals branch, abundance of contour-parallel specimens, differential preservation within specimens, and specimens overlying spindles and discs all imply that Bradgatia had an attached, epifaunal, suspension-feeding lifestyle. Bradgatia's multiple thin petals would have helped to filter water more efficiently, while its lack of a stem would have allowed for suspension feeding along the entire length of each petal.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".