FLUORESCENCE PROPERTIES OF EXCEPTIONALLY PRESERVED COLORED LEAVES FROM THE PLIOCENE OF THE WILLERSHAUSEN LAGERSTÄTTE, GERMANY
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Willershausen Fossil-Lagerstätte in Germany is well-known for the exceptional preservation of plant and animal fossils and represents one of the taxonomically richest Pliocene assemblages in Europe. Vertebrate fossils found in the laminated carbonates from Willershausen often show preservation of soft parts, and leaves are famous for their color preservation. Here, we report the discovery of distinct UV-light induced fluorescence in different fossil angiosperm leaf taxa from Willershausen. An astonishing observation was the presence of different fluorescence colors that ranged from yellow to red. Moreover, fluorescence properties were found to be related to genera. Using confocal laser scanning microscopy, fluorescence emission spectra were measured from fossil and present-day leaves. On the basis of their emission maxima, it was possible to distinguish broad groups of fluorophores. Our results suggest that fluorescence properties of the Willershausen leaves are mainly caused by taxon-dependent degeneration of organic compounds during senescence. Therefore, fluorescence properties might be used for supplementary taxonomic information. Because the investigated leaf fossils from Willershausen were found in a single horizon, it can be excluded that observed differences in fluorescence properties are the result from differences in diagenesis.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".