A sand tiger shark–dominated fauna from the Eocene Arctic greenhouse
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We describe a new shark fauna from Canada's westernmost Arctic island, Banks Island, Northwest Territories, based upon thousands of shark teeth recovered from lower–middle Eocene sediments of the Cyclic Member (Eureka Sound Formation) on northern Banks Island, Northwest Territories (∼74°N latitude). Based upon palynology, the sediments preserving the shark teeth are late early to middle Eocene in age and likely span the Early Eocene Climatic Optimum (EECO). The low-diversity faunal assemblage is dominated by the sand tiger sharks Striatolamia and Carcharias, but also includes relatively rare teeth of the carcharhinid Physogaleus (extinct relative of sharpnose and tiger sharks) and very rare teeth of the odontaspidid Odontaspis winkleri. We also report the occurrence of the ray Myliobatis. Based upon analogy with extant Carcharias taurus and Myliobatis, the presence of Carcharias and Myliobatis on northern Banks Island corroborates the relatively warm sea surface temperatures estimated by others for the Eocene Arctic Ocean. We hypothesize that the low diversity of the Banks Island shark fauna, in comparison with other early Eocene brackish, shallow-marine chondrichthyan assemblages such as the Abbey Wood (U.K.) fauna, is probably due to environmental factors, including reduced salinity.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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 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".