“King of the Riverside”, a multi-proxy approach offers a new perspective on mosasaurs before their extinction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The discovery of a mosasaurine tooth (NDGS 12217) in the Hell Creek Formation, Morton County, North Dakota, adds to the growing evidence that mosasaurs, traditionally considered marine reptiles, could inhabit freshwater environments. This tooth was found in a context devoid of other marine taxa, suggesting the individual may have ventured into freshwater environments. The morphology of the tooth supports a conservative referral to the tribe Prognathodontini, and stable isotope analyses on carbonate and phosphate fractions of tooth enamel, along with 87Sr/86Sr ratios, indicate a freshwater origin. These findings challenge the notion of mosasaurs as exclusively marine predators, highlighting their potential ecological flexibility during the Late Maastrichtian. This study employs a multi-proxy approach to compare the tooth’s isotopic signatures with other taxa from the same and nearby formations (including teeth of other mosasaurines), providing insights into the environmental transitions of the Western Interior Seaway (WIS) towards the end of the Cretaceous. This comprehensive approach aims to provide deeper insights into the behavior, ecology, and potential migratory patterns of mosasaurs beyond their known marine habitats, enhancing our understanding of their adaptation to rapidly changing environments during the Late Cretaceous.
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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 | 0.000 | 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) | 0.000 | 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".