Skeletal pathologies in extant crocodilians as a window into the paleopathology of fossil archosaurs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Crocodilians, together with birds, are the only extant relatives to many extinct archosaur groups, making them highly important for interpreting paleopathological conditions in a phylogenetic disease bracketing model. Despite this, comprehensive data on osteopathologies in crocodilians remain scarce. Here, we present the largest osteopathological survey to date of extant crocodilian skeletal material, comprising 927 individuals and 22,281 skeletal elements spanning all three extant crocodilian families. Our results reveal 1969 osteopathologies from 414 of all individuals (44.7%). Bone trauma is the most prevalent osteopathology, representing 43.9% of all pathologies observed, followed by inflammatory lesions (27.3%) and degenerative joint disorders (11.5%). Statistical analyses demonstrate significant correlations between adult body size, ontogeny, and trauma frequency, with large-sized crocodilian species and older individuals sustaining substantially more injuries. The skull, particularly the dorsal cranial aspect, showed considerably higher involvement of trauma compared to the rest of the skeleton. We also show that non-traumatic pathologies such as inflammation and degenerative joint disorders increase in larger crocodilian species and with ontogeny. These findings underscore the behavioral and physiological drivers of skeletal disease in modern crocodilians and offer key comparative data for interpreting osteopathologies in fossil archosaurs and archosauriforms.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".