Investigation into the biology and preservation of banded dentine in mosasaur dentitions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Dentine exhibits micrometre scale growth marks which are due to the daily and weekly growth of bioapatite and associated tissues. It is unknown if banded dentine in fossils, which present colour differences from normal dentine, are formed during tooth development and are evidence of physiological processes, are a result of diagenesis post-mortem, or are a combination of physiology and diagenesis. Through research on mosasaur teeth collected from the Late Cretaceous Western Interior Seaway (WIS) of Manitoba using elemental, morphological, optical, textural, and isotopic analyses, the factors leading to banded dentine formation were investigated. Two different mechanisms of banded dentine development became apparent. The first mechanism was caused by diagenetic alteration of the surrounding tubules and dentine layers through the effects of fracturing with high concentrations of secondarily precipitated minerals. Although evidence of diagenetic alteration was present, secondary ion mass spectroscopy stable isotope analysis demonstrated that similar oxygen isotope values to those found in previous studies in the enamel of southern WIS mosasaurs also persisted in northern WIS mosasaurid dentine, suggesting a biological signal was not overprinted. The second mechanism found very little evidence of diagenetic alteration and more evidence of a physiological process generating banded dentine. Through TEM analysis, the structure of normal vs. occluded dentine was documented for the first time in a marine reptile, with potential implications for interpreting palaeopathologies in the fossil record. Each of these studies emphasizes the effects of diagenesis on dental tissues but also shows that physiological processes are preserved, giving insight into the lives of extinct marine reptiles.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".