THE ICHNOLOGICAL AND DEPOSITIONAL CONTEXT OF BIOERODED TRICERATOPS BONES FROM THE MAASTRICTHIAN FRENCHMAN FORMATION OF SOUTHERN SASKATCHEWAN, CANADA
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Previous studies on osteic bioerosion trace fossils on dinosaur bones have contributed to our understanding of Mesozoic terrestrial paleoecology and depositional environments. In many cases, body fossils of the inferred tracemaker are either exceedingly rare or absent from the fossil record due to taphonomy. However, studies of bioerosion on dinosaur material conducted on Canadian specimens are uncommon, which is surprising given the volume of dinosaur material collected each year in the country. The ceratopsid Triceratops prorsus is the most common dinosaur fossil from the latest Maastrichtian Frenchman Formation in Saskatchewan, represented by thousands of specimens. Classifying osteic bioerosion trace fossils on Triceratops bones from the Frenchman Formation using established ichnotaxobases coupled with sedimentological data allows for insight into the hidden invertebrate diversity within the Frenchman Formation, as well as how plants used dinosaur bones as a nutrient source.\nStratigraphic sections of the Frenchman Formation were measured in four localities containing Triceratops specimens. All bioeroded specimens of Triceratops identified were preserved in organic-rich mudstone and siltstone deposits, representing floodplain paleosols. Soils are the ideal habitat for terrestrial invertebrate scavengers that serve as the decomposers of decaying animal matter during the early dry stages of decay. The large ichnodiversity of osteic bioerosion trace fossils preserved in Triceratops bones from the Frenchman Formation are the result of pupation chamber construction and necrophagous, and possibly osteophagous terrestrial invertebrates, likely beetles based on comparisons of extant carrion beetle behaviour. Rhizoetchings on bone can be attributed to ancient plant roots directly associated with the Triceratops bones. Established plant communities that utilize soils therefore have a significant ichnological footprint on post-mortem Triceratops bones following burial. Different degrees of preservation of Triceratops bones within floodplain and overbank deposits including poorly drained or water-logged paleosols indicate different taphonomic pathways. This thesis serves as a template for future taphonomic studies of vertebrate body fossils material, considering sedimentological and ichnological evidence on the bones.
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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 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".