Data from: A method for deducing neck mobility in plesiosaurs, using the exceptionally preserved Nichollssaura borealis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The elongate-necked aquatic plesiosaurs existed for 135 million years during the Mesozoic. The function of this elongate neck is a point of debate. Using computed tomography (CT) and 3-dimensional (3D) modelling, the range of motion (ROM) of the plesiosaur *Nichollssaura borealis* neck was assessed. To quantify the ROM, the intervertebral mobility was measured along the cervical vertebral column. This was done by manipulating the 3D models in the lateral and dorso-ventral directions during two trials. The first assessed the mean intervertebral ROM between pairs of cervical vertebrae along the entire column, and the second assessed ROM with reduced intervertebral spaces. The results suggest that there may be preference for lateral neck movements in *N. borealis*, which could correspond to an ecological function related to prey capture. This study demonstrates that 3D modelling is an effective tool for assessing function morphology for structures where no good modern analogue exists.
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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 | 0.003 | 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 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.014 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".