Palaeoecological inferences for the fossil Australian snakes<i>Yurlunggur</i>and<i>Wonambi</i>(Serpentes, Madtsoiidae)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Madtsoiids are among the most basal snakes, with a fossil record dating back to the Upper Cretaceous (Cenomanian). Most representatives went extinct by the end of the Eocene, but some survived in Australia until the Late Cenozoic.YurlunggurandWonambiare two of these late forms, and also the best-known madtsoiids to date. A better understanding of the anatomy and palaeoecology of these taxa may shed light on the evolution and extinction of this poorly known group of snakes and on early snake evolution in general. A digital endocast of the inner ear ofYurlunggurwas compared to those of 81 species of snakes and lizards with known ecological preferences using three-dimensional geometric morphometrics. The inner ear ofYurlunggurmost closely resembles both that of certain semiaquatic snakes and that of some semifossorial snakes. Other cranial and postcranial features of this snake support the semifossorial interpretation. While the digital endocast of the inner ear ofWonambiis too incomplete to be included in a geometric morphometrics study, its preserved morphology is very different from that ofYurlunggurand suggests a more generalist ecology. Osteology, palaeoclimatic data and the palaeobiogeographic distribution of these two snakes are all consistent with these inferred ecological differences.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".