Diversity in a greenhouse world: herpetofauna from the late Eocene (MP 17A) of La Bouffie, Quercy Phosphorites (Lot, SW France)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The Quercy Phosphorites area (Southwestern France) provides more than 200 fossiliferous localities, ranging from the early Eocene to the Early Miocene. These localities document a rich and diverse continental fauna and highlight a massive turnover in vertebrates around the Eocene–Oligocene transition. Among them, the locality of La Bouffie, from the early late Eocene (MP 17A) has yielded a diverse herpetofauna, including rare taxa for Europe (e.g., Tupinambinae). Unfortunately, most of the herpetofauna has never been described nor illustrated, leaving uncertainties regarding its true diversity. We here describe “forgotten” and undescribed specimens from La Bouffie, that pertain to pyxicephalid anurans, and gekkotan, lacertid, amphisbaenian, pleurodontan, glyptosaurid, anguine, helodermatid and palaeovaranid lizards. Among them, five taxa are identified for the first time in La Bouffie, including two new genera and species: Phosphoriguana peritechne gen. et sp. nov. (?Pleurodonta) and Cadurcopanoplos vaylatsensis gen. et sp. nov. (Glyptosauridae). Phosphoriguana peritechne gen. et sp. nov. represents the fourth pleurodontan genus from the late Eocene of Europe, highlighting the diversity of the clade on the continent prior to the “Grande Coupure”. The glyptosaurine glyptosaurid Cadurcopanoplos vaylatsensis gen. et sp. nov. represents only the second late Eocene glyptosaurine from Europe, differing from Placosaurus in having a cranial osteoderm pattern reminiscent of early Eocene glyptosaurines, like Sullivanosaurus ; it therefore suggests a higher diversity of this group in the late Eocene. A review of the herpetofauna of La Bouffie identifies at least 18 illustrated and formally described taxa, while other 8 need to be properly reassessed, as the latter have only been so far briefly mentioned. This renders La Bouffie one of the most diverse late Eocene localities in Europe.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".