Taphonomic history of a dinosaur skeleton from the upper Cretaceous Frenchman Formation, Canada: insights from ancient rhizoetchings and invertebrate bioerosion trace fossils
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Bioerosion trace fossils are biogenic structures that record evidence of behaviour in hard substrates, including bone. While bioerosion trace fossils on bones produced by animals have been well documented globally throughout the Mesozoic and Cenozoic, studies on such structures created by ancient plants are less common. Herein, we document an incomplete Triceratops skeleton from the latest Maastrichtian Frenchman Formation in southwestern Saskatchewan, Canada, which features several bioerosion trace fossils. The quarry containing the specimen consists of a blocky white to pink organic-rich mudstone, with a dense system of fossil root structures surrounding the bone material. This mudstone is interpreted as a heavily vegetated floodplain paleosol. Fossilized plant material associated with the Triceratops bones is preserved as compressed, black carbonaceous root structures lying within shallow horizontal furrows penetrating the cortical surface of the bone (i.e. rhizoetchings). Additional trace fossils include Amphifaoichnus seilacheri and Cubiculum inornatus, which are thought to have been produced by insects. This study contributes to our understanding of the taphonomic processes that affect Cretaceous vertebrate deposits and may elucidate the previously unappreciated role ancient plants played in the preservation and taphonomy of dinosaur skeletons.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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".