Swimming speed estimation of extinct marine reptiles: energetic approach revisited
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cruising speeds of Mesozoic marine reptiles have been estimated in the past by using a mathematical model of energetic equilibrium during steady swimming. This method suffered from a significant tendency to overestimate speeds of extant cetaceans for no clear reason, which raised questions about the validity of the approach itself. The present study identifies the factors that caused this shortcoming and proposes corrections and some additional modifications. These include the use of more accurate body shape models, updated metabolic rate models, and optimal rather than critical swimming speeds. The amended method successfully approximates published optimal speeds of several extant marine vertebrates, including cetaceans, showing that the basic framework of the energetic approach is valid. With this confirmation, the method was applied to Mesozoic marine reptiles, by assuming three different metabolic rate categories known in extant swimming vertebrates (i.e., average ectothermic, raised ectothermic, and marine endothermic levels). The results support previous inferences about the relative cruising capabilities of Mesozoic marine reptiles (i.e., ichthyosaurs > plesiosaurs > mosasaurs). Stenopterygius , a thunniform ichthyosaur, was probably capable of cruising at a speed at least comparable to those reported for some extant thunniform teleosts with similar diets (~1 m/second).
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.
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) | 0.000 | 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 it