A redescription of <i>Lophorhothon atopus</i> (Ornithopoda: Dinosauria) from the Late Cretaceous of Alabama based on new material<sup>1</sup>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Diagnostic dinosaur fossils of the southeastern United States are rare discoveries, and even more precious are those fossils that preserve a large portion of a skeleton. Sixty years ago, the dinosaur Lophorhothon atopus was described from Upper Cretaceous sediments of Alabama. It then represented the oldest, most complete, dinosaur in the southeastern United States. Based on a reexamination of the holotype material and a new specimen collected from the same beds, we provide a new diagnosis of this taxon. In particular, the solid nasal crest has several autapomorphies including caudally projecting frontal processes that are oval in cross section, meaning that they did not coalesce at the midline. Other autapomorphies are found on the prefrontal and squamosal. Combining the two Lophorhothon specimens provides nearly the entire skeleton for phylogenetic analysis, which we find as a hadrosauromorph just outside of Hadrosauridae. The original diagnosis of this taxon included the frontonasal fontanelle as a distinguishing character, but comparing the many examples of frontonasal openings across hadrosauromorph taxa shows that in at least a few species, such as Lophorhothon, the structures should be considered a frontonasal fenestra instead of a fontanelle. Additionally, the notion that dinosaurs from the East Coast of the United States represent primitive relicts is an idea that originated before many of the European and Asian hadrosauromorphs known today had been discovered. With new dating and phylogenetic information, it appears that Appalachian dinosaurs are on par evolutionarily with most of the global community and the term ”relict fauna” should be abandoned.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".