Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The concept of “mosasaur” is explored from the perspective of its historical origins, and tested empirically and phylogenetically in order to examine the concept in its modern application. Historical analysis of the origins of the concept of “mosasaur” makes it clear that the term bears significant historical burden (comparative anatomic, empirical, phylogenetic, paleontological, etc.). In order to address the flaws in the concept of mosasaur properly, this treatise critically assesses Camp’s [1923] diagnostic characters for Anguimorpha, Platynota, Varanoidea, and Mosasauroidea, concluding that Camp’s data permit mosasaurs to be viewed only as anguimorphans, not platynotans nor varanoids. A similar critical assessment is given for the characters used to diagnose anguimorphans and varanoids in Estes et al. [1988], concluding here that not a single character out of twenty-two is shared between varanoids and mosasaurs. The character concept developed by Romer [1956] for the “posteriorly retracted nares” of varanoids, and then later mosasaurs, is critically examined and found to be insufficient as a test of similarity of the intended primary homologs. The recent work of Rieppel et al. [2007], Conrad [2008] and Conrad et al. [2010] is critically reviewed as these authors revive the use, and subdivision, of the “posteriorly retracted nares” as a character in anguimorph phylogenetic analysis. Based on these criticisms, it is concluded here that there is no character-based evidence to support phylogenetic hypotheses that mosasaurs are derived aquatic varanoid lizards. A key recommendation of this treatise is that the hypothesis conceiving of mosasaurs as derived aquatic varanoids be abandoned. The final critical review presented in this treatise examines the taxonomic implications, relating to the concept of “mosasaur”, arising from the hypothesis of convergent paddle-like limb evolution in mosasaurs as presented by Bell and Polcyn [2005]. In conclusion, it is recognized that the concept and term “mosasaur” has ceased to exist in any biologically meaningful way, and that the future requires the construction of a new suite of terms and concepts to convey what we now think we know about these animals.
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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.003 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".