Supplementary material from "Exotic cuticular specialisations in a Cambrian scalidophoran"
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Scalidophora, the ecdysozoan group including priapulids, kinorhynchs, and loriciferans, comprises some of the most abundant and ecologically important Cambrian animals. However, reconstructions of the morphology and lifestyles of fossil scalidophorans are often hampered by poor preservation of their submillimetre-scale cuticular specialisations. Based on exceptionally preserved Small Carbonaceous Fossils (SCFs), we describe a new scalidophoran-grade animal, Scalidodendron crypticum gen. et sp. nov., from the Early to Middle Cambrian Hess River Formation of northern Canada. The Hess River SCFs comprise pharyngeal teeth, coniform sclerites, and hook-like sclerites, all closely comparable to known scalidophoran counterparts. The coniform and hook-like sclerites recurrently associate with arborescent cuticular projections that show multiple orders of branching, morphologically unlike those of any known living or fossil scalidophoran. The fine splintering and inferred post-pharyngeal position of these structures argue against locomotory, feeding, and defensive roles with direct analogues in extant counterparts. As such, the arborescent structures of Scalidodendron denote a previously cryptic range of morphological variation in Cambrian scalidophorans, paralleling that of coeval panarthropods but expressed at a fundamentally different level of anatomical organisation.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.710 | 0.265 |
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".