Remarkable soft tissue anatomy recorded in titanosaur (Sauropoda) tracks from the latest Cretaceous of Mongolia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Dinosaur footprints can provide important palaeobiological information, including the speed, behaviour, limb kinematics, and soft tissue anatomy of the trackmaker. Here we report on a collection of well-preserved natural track casts made by sauropods from the Nemegt locality (latest Cretaceous) in southern Mongolia. These casts of isolated mani and pedes preserve exceptional details of the soft tissues including the ungual and fleshy cuticle of pedal digits I and II; regional changes in scale size across the pes, and peculiar spur-like scales on the lateral, posterior, and palmar surfaces of the mani. These tracks show that the large pedal unguals were largely encased in squamous soft tissues and that only a small portion of the claw protruded beyond the cuticle. These findings imply that pedal digit range of motion would have been reduced compared to traditional bone-on-bone estimates, although scratch digging remains a tenable hypothesis for pedal digit function. Fleshy pads on the pes and spur-like scales on the manus may have been adaptations to deal with the sandy substrates of the Nemegt ecosystem, although other explanations cannot be excluded. These discoveries provide novel insights into the soft tissue anatomy and potential function of the mani and pedes of the Nemegt sauropods.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".