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Record W4416848455 · doi:10.3390/min15121271

The Controversial Origin of Ferruginous “Coprolites”

2025· article· en· W4416848455 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
George Mustoe

Bibliographic record

VenueMinerals · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEarth and Planetary Sciences
TopicPaleontology and Evolutionary Biology
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsTaphonomyCretaceousAbiotic componentPaleoecologyGeologic record

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Ferruginous bromalites (coprolites and cololites) occur in enormous quantities in the Upper Cretaceous Whitemud Formation of Saskatchewan, Canada, and in Miocene deposits in Madagascar and southwest Washington, USA. The origins of these specimens have been the subject of diverse and often conflicting interpretations. This paper includes some discussion of other localities, but the main focus is on specimens from Wilkes Formation at Salmon Creek, Lewis County, Washington State, USA. This locality is notable because the geologic setting and paleoenvironment are well-established, and the purported bromalites can be observed in situ, providing stratigraphic and taphonomic information that is not available for the Canada and Madagascar locations. Past research at Salmon Creek has a curious history. Supporters of the coprolite interpretation have relied on Salmon Creek specimens collected by others. In contrast, field-based investigators have concluded that the extruded objects are probably pseudofossils. Was the origin of these objects biotic excretion or abiotic extrusion? Past evidence is not sufficient for resolving this issue. New information strengthens the abiotic interpretation, but these ferruginous specimens remain as a geologic enigma.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.259
Threshold uncertainty score0.408

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.011
GPT teacher head0.238
Teacher spread0.226 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations2
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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