A giant nektobenthic radiodont from the Burgess Shale and the significance of hurdiid carapace diversity
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Radiodonts, stem-group euarthropods that evolved during the Cambrian explosion, were among the largest and most diversified lower palaeozoic predators. These animals were widespread geographically, occupying a variety of ecological niches, from benthic foragers to nektonic suspension feeders and apex predators. Here, we describe the largest Cambrian hurdiid radiodont known so far, Titanokorys gainesi , gen. et sp. nov., from the Burgess Shale (Marble Canyon, Kootenay National Park, British Columbia). Estimated to reach half a metre in length, this new species bears a very large ovoid-shaped central carapace with distinct short posterolateral processes and an anterior spine. Geometric morphometric analyses highlight the high diversity of carapace shapes in hurdiids and show that Titanokorys bridges a morphological gap between forms with long and short carapaces. Carapace shape, however, is prone to homoplasy and shows no consistent relationship with trophic ecology, as demonstrated by new data, including a reappraisal of the poorly known Pahvantia . Despite distinct carapaces, Titanokorys shares similar rake-like appendages for sediment-sifting with Cambroraster, a smaller but much more abundant sympatric hurdiid from the Burgess Shale . The co-occurrence of these two species on the same bedding planes highlights potential competition for benthic resources and the high diversity of large predators sustained by Cambrian communities.
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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 | 0.002 | 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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 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 it