New Cretaceous empidoids and the Mesozoic dance fly revolution (Diptera: Empidoidea)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Dance flies and relatives (Empidoidea) are a diverse and ecologically important group of Diptera in nearly all modern terrestrial ecosystems. Their fossil record, despite being scattered, attests to a long evolutionary history dating back to the early Mesozoic. Here, we describe seven new species of Empidoidea from Cretaceous Kachin amber inclusions, assigning them to the new genus Electrochoreutes gen.n. (type species: Electrochoreutes trisetigerus sp.n.) based on unique apomorphies among known Diptera. Like many extant dance flies, the males of Electrochoreutes are characterized by species-specific sexually dimorphic traits, which are likely to have played a role in courtship. The fine anatomy of the fossils was investigated through high-resolution X-ray phase-contrast microtomography to reconstruct their phylogenetic affinities within the empidoid clade, using cladistic reasoning. Morphology-based phylogenetic analyses including a selection of all extant family- and subfamily-ranked empidoid clades along with representatives of all extinct Mesozoic genera, were performed using a broad range of analytical methods (maximum parsimony, maximum-likelihood and Bayesian inference). These analyses converged in reconstructing Electrochoreutes as a stem-group representative of the Dolichopodidae, suggesting that complex mating rituals evolved in this lineage during the Cretaceous.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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".