Magnetic vector tomography reveals giant magnetofossils are optimised for magnetointensity reception
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Giant magnetofossils are unusual, micron-sized biogenic magnetite particles found in sediments dating back at least 97 million years. Their distinctive morphologies are the product of biologically controlled mineralisation, yet the identity of their biomineralising organism, and the biological function they serve, remain a mystery. It is currently thought that the organism exploited magnetite's mechanical properties for protection. Here we explore an alternative hypothesis, that it exploited magnetite's magnetic properties for the purpose of magnetoreception. We present a three-dimensional magnetic vector tomography study of a giant magnetofossil and assess its magnetoreceptive potential. Our results reveal a single magnetic vortex that displays an optimised response to spatial variations in the intensity of Earth's magnetic field. This magnetic trait may have conferred an evolutionary advantage to mobile marine organisms, providing an upper age limit on the development of navigational magnetoreception and raising the possibility that earlier evidence of this sense may yet be preserved in the fossil record. More broadly, this work provides a blueprint for assessing the morphological and magnetic evidence for putative biogenic iron oxide particles, which are a key component in the search for early life on Earth and Mars.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 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".