Priapulid neoichnology, ecosystem engineering, and the Ediacaran–Cambrian transition
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The evolutionary rise of powerful new ecosystem engineering impacts is thought to have played an important role in driving waves of biospheric change across the Ediacaran–Cambrian transition (ECT; c . 574–538 Ma). Among the most heavily cited of these is bioturbation (organism‐driven sediment disturbance) as these activities have been shown to have critical downstream geobiological impacts. In this regard priapulid worms are crucial; trace fossils thought to have been left by priapulan‐grade animals are now recognized as appearing shortly before the base of the Cambrian and represent some of the earliest examples of bed‐penetrative bioturbation. Understanding the ecosystem engineering impacts of priapulids may thus be key to reconstructing drivers of the ECT. However, priapulids are rare in modern benthic ecosystems, and thus comparatively little is known about the behaviours and impacts associated with their burrowing. Here, we present the early results of neoichnological experiments focused on understanding the ecosystem engineering impacts of priapulid worms. We observe for the first time a variety of new burrowing behaviours (including the formation of linked burrow networks and long in‐burrow residence times) hinting at larger ecosystem engineering impacts in this group than previously thought. Finally, we identify means by which these results may contribute to our understanding of tracemakers across the ECT, and the role they may have had in shaping the latest Ediacaran and earliest Cambrian biosphere.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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".