A new high-latitude Tylosaurus (Squamata, Mosasauridae) from Canada with unique dentition
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Mosasaurs were large aquatic lizards, typically 5 m or more in length, that lived during the Late Cretaceous (ca.100-66 Ma).Of the six subfamilies and more than 70 species recognized today, most were hydropedal (flipper-bearing).Mosasaurs were cosmopolitan apex predators, and their remains occur on every continent, including Antarctica.In North America, mosasaurs flourished in the Western Interior Seaway, an inland sea that covered a large swath of the continent between the Gulf of Mexico and the Arctic Ocean during much of the Late Cretaceous.The challenges of paleontological fieldwork in high latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere have biased mosasaur collections such that most mosasaur fossils are found within 0-60N paleolatitude, and in North America plioplatecarpine mosasaurs are the only mosasaurs yet confirmed to have existed in paleolatitudes higher than 60N.However, this does not mean mosasaur fossils are necessarily lacking at such latitudes.Herein, I report on the northernmost occurrence of a tylosaurine mosasaur from near Grande Prairie in Alberta, .Recovered from about 62N paleolatitude, this material (TMP 2014.011.0001) is assignable to the subfamily Tylosaurinae by exhibiting a cylindrical rostrum, broadly parallel-sided premaxillo-maxillary sutures, and overall homodonty.I further refer this material to Tylosaurus based on the lack of a dorsal midsagittal ridge on the premaxilla.Unexpectedly, TMP 2014.011.0001exhibits widely spaced, high-aspect-ratio marginal tooth crowns and low-profile maxillae, similar to the typical juvenile condition of Tylosaurus, despite its likely adult age based on an estimated body length of at least 6.5 m.The specimen also exhibits anterior maxillary tooth roots covered by downward extensions of the maxillary cortical bone, a feature previously unknown in Tylosaurinae.TMP 2014.011.0001hints at an undiscovered, temporally more stable ii Tylosaurus diversity in the northern latitudes of the seaway throughout the Late Cretaceous, possibly even into the latest Cretaceous and inclusive of the Arctic Circle.Analogous dental morphologies in other non-mosasaurid taxa, as well as a standard model of tooth function based on tooth morphology, indicate TMP 2014.011.0001 may have been specially adapted for piscivory.This study suggests the possible presence of a Cretaceous boreal marine community that was distinct from those across the more southern stretches of the Western Interior Seaway, in the western and southern United States.my teaching.I also wish to thank Drs. B.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".