Preservation of Tissue Structures in Late Cretaceous Vertebrate Remains from Alberta, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Here I investigate the rates of preserved original organic tissue and their quality within vertebrate bones that were preserved during the late Cretaceous of Alberta. Specimens recovered from the Dinosaur Park Formation provide a baseline for comparison to four other Alberta Formations (Brazeau, Foremost, Horseshoe Canyon, and Wapiti). Formations are all limited to approximately 13 MYA of one another, in order to eliminate excessive temporal variation in specimens. The formations studied were also chosen to cover a virtual transect of depositional settings from upland near source, to upper shoreface marine environments. This provides the opportunity to investigate if the general depositional environments play a major role in the preservation of original organic tissues in vertebrate remains from deep time. In addition to depositional environment, other previously proposed preservational factors are addressed, including the associated depositional matrix and amount of weathering before burial (degree of articulation). Findings reveal a general trend of greater tissue degradation across the terrestrial transect of depositional environments from upland to coastal plains. A marked increase in the preservation frequency and quality of tissues in upper shoreface facies reveals the potential of further investigations into tissues of extinct marine reptiles. Although groundwater quality during deposition of each of the formations has not been addressed in the literature, evidence addressed herein indicates that slight alkaline conditions were present in upland environments and slightly acidic conditions were present in those of coastal plains. Research done in an archaeological context has shown that groundwater pH plays the most significant role in the preservation of bone and its organic component. Findings made during this research indicate that initial pH levels not only have short term effects on the mineral and organic phases of bone, but also play a major role in preserving them into deep time.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| 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 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".