Tooth-Like Scales in Early Devonian Eugnathostomes and the ‘Outside-In’ Hypothesis for the Origins of Teeth in Vertebrates
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Although teeth are considered one of the most important steps in vertebrate evolution, details of their origins are obscure. Two prominent and opposing theories for the evolution of the vertebrate dentition are current: the ‘Outside-in’ hypothesis and the ‘inside-out’ hypothesis. One of the main arguments against the ‘outside-in’ hypothesis is that, although similarities between teeth and scales have been observed, there is little fossil evidence of transitional forms between the two structures. Specimens of ischnacanthid acanthodians from the Man On The Hill (MOTH) locality in the Mackenzie Mountains of Canada provide the first unequivocal example of such transitional forms in an Early Devonian (Lochkovian) vertebrate assemblage. The head scales of these specimens are modified with proximity to the mouth to be extremely tooth-like. Three distinct morphotypes of modified cheek and lip scales are described. Their detailed similarity to teeth suggests that they are a result of the same developmental processes, and also suggests the existence of a field of gene expression near the mouth margin in which scales could be transformed into teeth. These transitional forms remove one of the chief objections to the ‘outside-in’ hypothesis for the origins of teeth in vertebrates.
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 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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 |
| 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".