Two braincases of Daspletosaurus (Theropoda: Tyrannosauridae): anatomy and comparison1
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For sheer complexity, braincases are generally considered anatomically conservative. However, recent research on the braincases of tyrannosaurids have revealed extensive morphological variations. This line of inquiry has its root in Dale Russell's review of tyrannosaurids in which he established Daspletosaurus torosus — a large tyrannosaurine from the Campanian of southern Alberta. In the wake of systematic revisions to tyrannosaurines previously assigned to Daspletosaurus, one potentially distinct species remains undescribed. This paper describes and compares a braincase referable to this species with that of the holotype for Daspletosaurus torosus using computerized-tomography-based reconstructions. The two braincases have numerous differences externally and internally. The specimen of Daspletosaurus sp. has a bottlenecked olfactory tract, short and vertical lagena, and a developed ascending column of the anterior tympanic recess. The holotype of Daspletosaurus torosus has many unusual traits, including an anteriorly positioned trochlear root, elongate common carotid canal, distinct chamber of the basisphenoid recess, asymmetry in the internal basipterygoid aperture, and laterally reduced but medially expanded subcondylar recess. This comparison also identified characters that potentially unite the two species of Daspletosaurus, including deep midbrain flexures in the endocasts. However, many character variations in the braincases are known in other tyrannosaurids to correlate with body size and maturity, or represent individual variations. Therefore, taxonomic and phylogenetic signals can be isolated from background variations in a more comprehensive approach by using additional specimens. New information on the two braincases of Daspletosaurus is consistent with the emerging view of tyrannosaurid braincases as highly variable, ontogenetically dynamic character complexes.
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 machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".