The Earliest Fossil Mosquito (Diptera: Culicidae), in Mid-Cretaceous Burmese Amber
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Burmaculex antiquus new genus, new species, is described from a single partially preserved adult female in Burmese amber. The fossil has several plesiomorphic features, indicating that it is the sister group of all other fossil and extant Culicidae: a relatively short proboscis, the palpi extending beyond the apex of the proboscis, a clypeus with several setae, and the palpus without scales. Antennal and mouthpart structure suggest the female of this fossil species was a vertebrate blood feeder. The age of Burmese amber has been estimated as between Upper Albian to Turonian, 100–90 million years ago but the origins of the Culicidae are likely significantly older. The sister group of the Culicidae are the Chaoboridae, known as Jurassic fossils, and the Culicidae therefore must be equally as old. Although fossil adults of the two families may not be distinct at this early stage of evolution, the immatures would likely provide distinguishing features.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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".