Dental ontogeny in extinct synapsids reveals a complex evolutionary history of the mammalian tooth attachment system
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The mammalian dentition is uniquely characterized by a combination of precise occlusion, permanent adult teeth and a unique tooth attachment system. Unlike the ankylosed teeth in most reptiles, mammal teeth are supported by a ligamentous tissue that suspends each tooth in its socket, providing flexible and compliant tooth attachment that prolongs the life of each tooth and maintains occlusal relationships. Here we investigate dental ontogeny through histological examination of a wide range of extinct synapsid lineages to assess whether the ligamentous tooth attachment system is unique to mammals and to determine how it evolved. This study shows for the first time that the ligamentous tooth attachment system is not unique to crown mammals within Synapsida, having arisen in several non-mammalian therapsid clades as a result of neoteny and progenesis in dental ontogeny. Mammalian tooth attachment is here re-interpreted as a paedomorphic condition relative to the ancestral synapsid form of tooth attachment.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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 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".