A juvenile pterosaur vertebra with putative crocodilian bite from the Campanian of Alberta, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Identifying feeding interactions in the fossil record remains a key challenge for paleoecologists. We report the rare occurrence of a conical, perforative bite mark in a cervical vertebra of an azhdarchid pterosaur, which we identified as a juvenile individual of Cryodrakon boreas Hone, Habib, and Therrien, 2019 from the Campanian Dinosaur Park Formation in Alberta, Canada. Based on comparative analysis of the dentition and ecomorphology of potential trace makers in the Dinosaur Park Formation, as well as the morphology of the trace, the most likely candidate is a crocodilian, although whether it was made as a result of scavenging or predatory behavior is unknown. Feeding interactions involving pterosaurs are rare globally, whereas crocodilian bite marks are not uncommon in Cretaceous terrestrial ecosystems. Given the opportunistic feeding style and known range of food items for both extant and extinct crocodilians, pterosaurs can be counted as a rare, but not surprising, component of at least some Cretaceous crocodilian diets.
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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) | 0.001 | 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".