Digital volumetric modeling reveals unique body plan experimentation in the Devonian tetrapod Ichthyostega
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The water-to-land transition in tetrapods promoted a radical shift in locomotor function and kinematic patterns, from axial- to appendicular-dominated propulsion and from buoyancy- to musculoskeletal-driven support. Many of these facets of locomotion are dictated by an animal's whole-body mass properties, which presumably also changed across this transition. We herein use digital volumetric modeling to reconstruct mass properties in the Late Devonian tetrapod Ichthyostega . In comparison to fishes and crown tetrapods, our results show that Ichthyostega possessed a uniquely "robust" body plan, combining traits typical of both "fishes" (anterior center-of-mass) and "tetrapods" (well-developed limbs, especially forelimbs). We also find that variation in body composition has little effect on body attitude at flotational equilibrium, suggesting that whole-body "evolutionary tinkering" had little impact on hydrostatic profile. These results support previous inferences of forelimb-dominated movements in Ichthyostega and highlight a hitherto underappreciated level of morphological experimentation during the tetrapod transition to land.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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".