Generalist diet of <i>Microraptor zhaoianus</i> included mammals
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Gut contents are extremely important for inferring trophic interactions between extinct species. These are, however, very rare in the fossil record and it is not always possible to accurately identify both the carnivore and the consumed organisms. Here we describe the remains of a small fossil mammal foot preserved inside the body cavity of the holotype specimen of the small feathered dinosaur Microraptor zhaoianus. This adds to the known diversity of diet for this genus, which also consumed birds, fish, and lizards. Previous interpretations that Microraptor was an arboreal hunter of birds and adept hunter of fish are not supported. Although the various known stomach contents would be plausible prey items based on size, there is no clear evidence that any of them were predated rather than scavenged, and Microraptor likely did both and foraged in multiple habitats.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".