High diversity of late Early Cretaceous ichthyosaurs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Considered as the last survivors of a dying group, all Cretaceous ichthyosaurs have traditionally been incorporated within a single genus, Platypterygius. This waste-basket genus includes large ichthyosaurs with numerous, large and conical tooth crowns and bulbous polygonal root well anchored in dental grooves. With such a dentition, Platypterygius can be included within the “Smash guild”. However, the study of new specimens from the Aptian-Albian marls of the Vocontian basin (SE France) reveals an unexpected diversity of late Early Cretaceous ichthyosaurs. Beside “classical” Platypterygius specimens, another type of ichthyosaur with very tiny and pointed teeth has been found in the mid-Albian marls of Sisteron, in High-Provence Alps. This new taxon is based on a partial crushed skull, two basioccipitals, 8 teeth, and 15 centra. The teeth range from 20mm to 2cm and are highly compressed labio-lingualy, with a thickness/wideness ratio of the root sometimes as low as 1/4. Crowns are slightly curved and sharply pointed, indicating a diet of small and soft preys. Interestingly, although the rostral bones are slender and delicate – thus radically different from conventional Late Early Cretaceous ichthyosaurs – the basioccipital of this taxon shares many characters with Platypterygius and is of the same overall size. Together with the recently named genus Maiaspondylus from the Albian of western Canada, these specimens suggest a higher diversity of late Early Cretaceous ichthyosaurs, in contradiction with the current view of ichthyosaur extinction, said to be gradually decreasing in diversity since the Middle Jurassic. In fact, the number of ecological niches occupied by ichthyosaurs apparently even increased from the Late Jurassic until the late Early Cretaceous. Therefore, the ecological impact of the Cenomanian-Turonian boundary on marine reptile faunas was probably more severe than previously thought.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 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".