Fossil crabs in the Caribbean: taphonomic comparisons as an informed indicator of underexploited occurrences
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Antilles include over 100 islands, each with a rock record that embraces different slices of the stratigraphic succession; this is probably the most beguiling geological quality of the region. Both authors have been collecting fossil crabs (decapod crustaceans) from these islands for almost 30 years. Experience has demonstrated that, whatever fossil crustaceans have been described from an island, there are undoubtedly more waiting for attention. Marine decapods can commonly be collected in hand specimen. If there are poorly lithified sedimentary rocks, they will likely repay sieving with an abundance of fragments. For many stratigraphic horizons it is only the disarticulated elements such as these that are known, but they are identifiable and can be diverse. We promote three units from the Antilles as being highly likely to produce new and well-preserved faunas of decapod crustaceans: the Yellow Limestone Group (Eocene, Jamaica); the Anguilla Formation (Miocene, Anguilla); and the Rockly Bay Formation (Pliocene, Tobago). Both the Yellow Limestone Group and Anguilla Formation have produced fossil decapods, albeit indifferently preserved. In contrast, both units have yielded a diversity of well-preserved echinoids; the reasons for this contrast remain speculative. The Rockly Bay Formation is the most barnacle-rich unit in the Antilles, yet decapods, another marine arthropod group with a calcareous skeleton, remain undescribed, but are present. These units need to be exploited for fossil decapods and, in so doing, these new data will improve the known palaeobiodiversity of the Antillean region.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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".