Permian hypercarnivore suggests dental complexity among early amniotes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The oldest known complex terrestrial vertebrate community included hypercarnivorous varanopids, a successful clade of amniotes with wide geographic and temporal distributions. Little is known about their dentition and feeding behaviour, but with the unprecedented number of specimens of the varanopid Mesenosaurus from cave deposits in Oklahoma, we show that it exhibited serrations on the tooth crowns, and exceptionally rapid rates of development and reduced longevity relative to other terrestrial amniotes. In contrast, the coeval large apex predator Dimetrodon greatly increased dental longevity by increasing thickness and massiveness, whereas herbivores greatly reduced tooth replacement rates and increased dental longevity. Insectivores and omnivores represented the primitive condition and maintained modest replacement rates and longevity. The varied patterns of dental development among these early terrestrial amniotes reveal a hidden aspect of dental complexity in the emerging diverse amniote community, very soon after their initial appearance in the fossil record.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".