Palaeoenvironments and palaeoecology of the Early Pennsylvanian Lancaster Formation (‘Fern Ledges’) of Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Pennsylvanian Lancaster Formation (‘Fern Ledges’) of Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada contains a world-famous fossil biota. Largely unstudied since the works of Hartt, Dawson, Matthew, and Stopes in the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth century, we present new data concerning biostratigraphy, taxonomy, palaeoenvironments, and palaeoecology. Megafloral assemblages suggest a mid- to late Langsettian age for the succession, making it approximately coeval with the classic Joggins Formation of nearby Nova Scotia. Facies analysis suggests deposition on a tectonically influenced coastal plain whose braided channels drained into a shallow brackish gulf. Most of the historical fossil collections are derived from flooding surfaces formed by abrupt subsidence events along the coastline. Three communities are recognized. Phoronids, crustaceans, and xiphosurans lived in brackish coastal waters. A lowland community of gastropods, insects, arachnids, and myriapods inhabited coastal forests. Coastal vegetation was dominated by shrubby cordaitaleans and pteridosperms whereas ferns, sphenopsids, and lycopsids were rare. An upland or dryland community, discernible from allochthonous assemblages, comprised forests of giant cordaitaleans, archaic pteridosperms, and plants of uncertain affinity.
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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) | 0.000 | 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) | 0.001 | 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 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".