To glide or to swim? A reinvestigation of the enigmatic <i>Wapitisaurus problematicus</i> (Reptilia) from the Early Triassic of British Columbia, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Wapitisaurus problematicus was initially described as a member of the Weigeltisauridae, a clade of Late Permian gliding reptiles from Eurasia and Madagascar. However, the poor preservation of the holotype and only known specimen, from the lower Sulphur Mountain Formation at Ganoid Ridge (British Columbia, Canada), raised doubts about this assignment. Here, we redescribe W. problematicus and reassess its systematic position among diapsid reptiles. Comparison with all known weigeltisaurids, as well as contemporaneous reptiles from the Sulphur Mountain Formation, indicates that the taxon instead represents a thalattosauroid thalattosauriform, with noted similarities to Thalattosaurus and Paralonectes . This reidentification restricts weigeltisaurids to the Late Permian, with no occurrence in North America. Wapitisaurus problematicus potentially represents one of the oldest thalattosauriforms and increases our understanding of their diversity and disparity during the late Early and Middle Triassic. The close morphological similarities with later (thalattosauroid) thalattosauriforms and their high abundance in (shallow) marine settings may indicate an earlier invasion of this realm than previously assumed. This parallels observations in early ichthyopterygians with widespread opportunistic trophic niche diversification occurring relatively rapidly after the end-Permian mass extinction event.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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 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".