A new mosasaurine from the Maastrichtian (Upper Cretaceous) phosphates of Morocco and its implications for mosasaurine systematics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT A new mosasaur, Eremiasaurus heterodontus, gen. et sp. nov., from the Maastrichtian phosphates of Morocco is described based on the basis of two specimens: one consisting of a nearly complete skull, vertebral column, and isolated appendicular elements, and the other a nearly complete skull with associated vertebral column. This new mosasaur exhibits a high degree of heterodonty and a large number of pygal vertebrae, the latter feature expressed to a greater degree only in Plotosaurus from the Maastrichtian of California. Analysis of a data matrix of 135 characters and 32 terminal taxa resulted in three equally most parsimonious trees, and recovered E. heterodontus as the sister taxon to Plotosaurini. A second analysis incorporating five species of the globidensine mosasaur Prognathodon recovered 252 most parsimonious trees. This second analysis also recovered E. heterodontus as the closest relative to the Plotosaurini, a position supported by the presence of an internarial bar keel, exclusion of the prefrontals from the narial borders, narial embayments in the frontal, and the presence of a quadrate ala groove. A change in the positions of several key character-state changes in the second analysis not only supports the exclusion of E. heterodontus from the globidensine mosasaurs, but also calls into question the monophyly of the Globidensini and the suite of quadrate and dental characters used to diagnose this group.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 | 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".