Fossil egg and eggshells from the Upper Cretaceous Hell Creek Formation, Montana
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite over a hundred years of intense paleontological exploration, the terrestrial rocks of the Upper Cretaceous (Maastrichtian) Hell Creek Formation of eastern Montana are remarkable for the absence of fossil eggs. Here, we describe the first fossil egg and additional eggshell fragments from the formation. The two-layered structure of the smooth 1600-µm-thick eggshell of Belonoolithus garbani, oogen. et oosp. nov., permits assignment of the 6 cm × 8 cm egg to Theropoda. Additional theropod eggshells, Dimorphoolithus bennetti, oogen. et oosp. nov., closely resemble Tubercuoolithus choteauensis (incertae sedis) from the Campanian Two Medicine Formation of Montana, differing only in ornamentation. Therefore, we establish Tubercuoolithidae, oofam. nov., to accommodate both eggshell types. Other eggshell types include two varieties of Spheroolithus, as well as Testudoolithus and Krokolithes. Whereas B. garbani and D. bennetti are unique to the Hell Creek Formation, the other three oogenera also occur in the stratigraphically older Two Medicine and Judith River formations of Montana, and the Oldman Formation of southern Alberta, Canada.Citation for this article: Jackson, F. D., and D. J. Varricchio. 2016. Fossil egg and eggshells from the Upper Cretaceous Hell Creek Formation, Montana. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. DOI: 10.1080/02724634.2016.1185432.
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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 | 0.000 | 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) | 0.002 | 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".