<i>Joermungandr bolti</i>, an exceptionally preserved ‘microsaur’ from the Mazon Creek Lagerstätte reveals patterns of integumentary evolution in Recumbirostra
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Carboniferous Pennsylvanian-aged (309–307 Ma) Mazon Creek Lagerstätte produces some of the earliest fossils of major Palaeozoic tetrapod lineages. Recently, several new tetrapod specimens collected from Mazon Creek have come to light, including the earliest fossorially adapted recumbirostrans. Here, we describe a new long-bodied recumbirostran, Joermungandr bolti gen. et sp. nov., known from a single part and counterpart concretion bearing a virtually complete skeleton. Uniquely, Joermungandr preserves a full suite of dorsal, flank and ventral dermal scales, together with a series of thinned and reduced gastralia. Investigation of these scales using scanning electron microscopy reveals ultrastructural ridge and pit morphologies, revealing complexities comparable to the scale ultrastructure of extant snakes and fossorial reptiles, which have scales modified for body-based propulsion and shedding substrate. Our new taxon also represents an important early record of an elongate recumbirostran bauplan, wherein several features linked to fossoriality, including a characteristic recumbent snout, are present. We used parsimony phylogenetic methods to conduct phylogenetic analysis using the most recent recumbirostran-focused matrix. The analysis recovers Joermungandr within Recumbirostra with likely affinities to the sister clades Molgophidae and Brachystelechidae. Finally, we review integumentary patterns in Recumbirostra, noting reductions and losses of gastralia and osteoderms associated with body elongation and, thus, probably also associated with increased fossoriality.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".