Alan JD Tennyson, Felix G Marx, Daniel T Ksepka
et al.
Abstract Fossils can reveal large differences between the geographic range that a species could potentially inhabit and the more restricted realized distribution where individuals presently occur. Extant great penguins ( Aptenodytes Miller, 1778) include emperor and king penguins, which have polar and subpolar ranges, respectively. New evidence now reveals that the fundamental niche for great penguins includes much warmer environments. Here, we report the first skull of an extinct great penguin that lived in Zealandia during the mid-Piacenzian Warm Period (mPWP) when global temperatures were ~3°C above those of the preindustrial era. Because estimated sea-surface temperatures in Zealandia during the mPWP were 10–20°C warmer than those experienced by living emperor and king penguins, we hypothesize that the exclusion of great penguins from lower latitudes today reflects constraints more complex than climate pressures alone. Terrestrial predation might be an overlooked factor because Aptenodytes appears to have gone extinct in Zealandia coincident with the arrival of large raptors like Haast’s eagle, Hieraaetus moorei (Haast, 1872), and Forbes’ harrier, Circus teauteensis Forbes, 1892.
Climate change caused by the consumption of fossil fuels has a significant adverse impact on the enjoyment of human rights globally. Therefore, the energy transition from fossil fuels to renewable fuels is necessary to prevent the human rights violations. On the other hand, the production of fossil fuels is the prerequisite for enjoying many human rights, including the right to access energy and the right to development in highly fossil fuel-dependent countries (HFFDCs). Thus, fossil fuels have paradoxical effects for these countries in terms of human rights. Considering the existing paradox, how should the energy transition for these countries proceed? This article shows that, based on a human-centred approach, by adopting reverse thinking, the starting point and cornerstone of the energy transition shsould be human rights. Given that human rights and human development overlap significantly, the low Human Development Index (HDI) of most HFFDCs implies that many of the basic human rights of their citizens are not being realised. The energy transition of HFFDCs with low HDI can be realized in two stages. Since there is a positive relationship between the production of fossil fuels and HDI in the early stages of the transition, in order for HFFDCs vertical energy transition to take place, their HDI must reach the average desired level (0.7) through the production of fossil fuels. When the right to development and the right to access energy are realised, due to the negative relationship between the HDI and fossil fuel use in the next stage, a horizontal energy transition could occur subsequently by phasing out fossil fuels.
Abstract A new genus and species of tubalepid antiarch, Tongdulepis concavus gen. et sp. nov., is described from the Middle Devonian (Qujing Formation, late Eifelian) in Huize County, Qujing, northeastern Yunnan, China. It differs from other antiarchs in the trapezoidal premedian plate, the absence of a postmarginal plate (except Tubalepis), trifid preorbital recess, contorted infraorbital sensory line on the lateral plate, and an anterior median dorsal plate with broad anterior margin and concave posterior margin. This material confirms the absence of the postmarginal plate in Tubalepididae and adds to the understanding of the neurocranium and brachial process in basal bothriolepidoids. Our phylogenetic result places Tongdulepis gen. nov. within Tubalepididae, specifically at the plesiomorphic position of the Tenizolepis-Dianolepis-Bothriolepis lineage.
Jorge D. Carrillo-Briceño, Iwan Stössel, René Kindlimann
et al.
Abstract The hybodontiform shark-like Strophodus was a large durophagous predator with highly specialized crushing-type dentition that mainly inhabited Mesozoic marine environments for more than 130 million years, with a fossil record spanning from the Middle Triassic to the Lower Cretaceous. Strophodus was a geographically widespread taxon with 13 species reported from Africa, Asia, Europe, India and South America. Here, we describe a new species of Strophodus, which we name Strophodus timoluebkei sp. nov. based on three teeth from the same individual in semi-articulated position. The holotype was collected in the Prealpine Sulzfluh Limestone Formation (Middle Oxfordian to Late Tithonian), Central Switzerland. Strophodus timoluebkei sp. nov. currently is the only vertebrate species reported from this geological unit, and its presence suggests that this durophagous shark likely played an important role as predator of the invertebrate fauna in this ancient Tethyan tropical coastal ecosystem. The new discovery sheds additional light onto the hybodontiform paleodiversity during the Upper Jurassic.
Abstract The evolutionary origin of turtles has long been debated, and recent studies continue to provide conflicting results. In some of the first trees of organisms ever drafted, Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) placed turtles close to birds based on morphological arguments. He only later became convinced by novel embryological and paleontological discoveries that birds are rather placed within dinosaurs, far removed from turtles. We analyzed Haeckel’s major publications on vertebrate phylogeny, with a focus on turtles and birds, and discuss his arguments for alternative interpretations of land vertebrate phylogeny. Haeckel carefully took the most recent developments in biology and paleontology into account to create his trees of life. While using his concept of the trifold parallelism between embryology, paleontology, and comparative anatomy, he understood his phylogenies as “fluent working hypotheses” with branches and taxon names floating, depending on available scientific evidence. Although Haeckel's trees resemble modern trees in many regards, he often pursued hypotheses not supported by recent data. We conclude that he committed those because of his strict attempts to order taxa by morphological homogeneity while not taking convergences into account.
Ethan Dean Mooney, Diane Scott, Robert Raphael Reisz
Abstract The evolutionary radiation of diapsid reptiles that includes all extant and most extinct reptiles is well-represented in the Mesozoic and Cenozoic fossil records, however, the earliest stages recorded in the Paleozoic Era are limited to comparatively few taxa. Consequently, the origins of Sauria, the crown-group of Diapsida, remains poorly understood and the phylogenetic positions of the few known taxa along the saurian stem are controversial. Here, we describe Akkedops bremneri sp. et gen. nov., a new early late Permian stem saurian from the Karoo of South Africa based on two skulls and show that the famous aggregation of "juvenile Youngina” SAM-PK-K7710 is also referrable to it, thereby making this one of the best-known stem saurians. The skull has a short rostrum, open lower temporal bar, large contribution of the postfrontal to the upper temporal fenestra, slender stapes, sliver-like supratemporal with a distinct lateral flange suturing to the postorbital, and lacks both postparietal and tabular bones. The saddle-shaped quadrate is rather saurian-like in being posteriorly emarginated with a tympanic crest and unique medial flange. The post cranial skeleton of Akkedops bremneri is lizard-like and notably shows a hook-shaped fifth metatarsal and thyroid fenestra. Phylogenetic analysis recovers Akkedops bremneri as sister to Sauria, which is especially surprising considering its rather small size and slender, lizard-like morphology prior to the split between the apparently similar lepidosauromorphs and many of the comparatively robust archosauromorph saurians. Our analysis also indicates that Youngina capensis falls outside the clade of Akkedops bremenri + Sauria and does not appear to form a clade with other “younginiform” reptiles. The available evidence indicates a surprising level of complexity related to the evolution of stem saurians and the origin of Sauria that occurred in the shadow of other Paleozoic amniotes.
A key objective in artificial intelligence (AI) development is to create systems that match or surpass human creativity. Although current AI models perform well across diverse creative tasks, it remains unclear whether these achievements reflect genuine creative thinking. This study examined whether AI models (GPT-3.5-turbo, GPT-4, and GPT-4o) engage in creative thinking by comparing their performance with humans across various creative tasks and core cognitive processes. Results showed that AI models outperformed humans in divergent thinking, convergent thinking, and insight problem-solving, but underperformed in creative writing. Compared to humans, AI generated lower forward flow values in both free and chain association tasks and showed lower accuracy in the representational change task. In creative evaluation, AI exhibited no significant correlation between the weights of novelty and appropriateness when predicting creative ratings, suggesting the absence of a human-like trade-off strategy. AI also had higher decision error scores in creative selection, suggesting difficulty identifying the most creative ideas. These findings suggest that while AI can mimic human creativity, its strong performance in creative tasks is likely driven by non-creative mechanisms rather than genuine creative thinking.
Felix Fent, Fabian Kuttenreich, Florian Ruch
et al.
Autonomous trucking is a promising technology that can greatly impact modern logistics and the environment. Ensuring its safety on public roads is one of the main duties that requires an accurate perception of the environment. To achieve this, machine learning methods rely on large datasets, but to this day, no such datasets are available for autonomous trucks. In this work, we present MAN TruckScenes, the first multimodal dataset for autonomous trucking. MAN TruckScenes allows the research community to come into contact with truck-specific challenges, such as trailer occlusions, novel sensor perspectives, and terminal environments for the first time. It comprises more than 740 scenes of 20s each within a multitude of different environmental conditions. The sensor set includes 4 cameras, 6 lidar, 6 radar sensors, 2 IMUs, and a high-precision GNSS. The dataset's 3D bounding boxes were manually annotated and carefully reviewed to achieve a high quality standard. Bounding boxes are available for 27 object classes, 15 attributes, and a range of more than 230m. The scenes are tagged according to 34 distinct scene tags, and all objects are tracked throughout the scene to promote a wide range of applications. Additionally, MAN TruckScenes is the first dataset to provide 4D radar data with 360° coverage and is thereby the largest radar dataset with annotated 3D bounding boxes. Finally, we provide extensive dataset analysis and baseline results. The dataset, development kit, and more are available online.
Minh Q. Tram, Nolan B. Gutierrez, William J. Beksi
Causal inference, a cornerstone in disciplines such as economics, genomics, and medicine, is increasingly being recognized as fundamental to advancing the field of robotics. In particular, the ability to reason about cause and effect from observational data is crucial for robust generalization in robotic systems. However, the construction of a causal graphical model, a mechanism for representing causal relations, presents an immense challenge. Currently, a nuanced grasp of causal inference, coupled with an understanding of causal relationships, must be manually programmed into a causal graphical model. To address this difficulty, we present initial results towards a human-centered augmented reality framework for creating causal graphical models. Concretely, our system bootstraps the causal discovery process by involving humans in selecting variables, establishing relationships, performing interventions, generating counterfactual explanations, and evaluating the resulting causal graph at every step. We highlight the potential of our framework via a physical robot manipulator on a pick-and-place task.
Existing game AI research mainly focuses on enhancing agents' abilities to win games, but this does not inherently make humans have a better experience when collaborating with these agents. For example, agents may dominate the collaboration and exhibit unintended or detrimental behaviors, leading to poor experiences for their human partners. In other words, most game AI agents are modeled in a "self-centered" manner. In this paper, we propose a "human-centered" modeling scheme for collaborative agents that aims to enhance the experience of humans. Specifically, we model the experience of humans as the goals they expect to achieve during the task. We expect that agents should learn to enhance the extent to which humans achieve these goals while maintaining agents' original abilities (e.g., winning games). To achieve this, we propose the Reinforcement Learning from Human Gain (RLHG) approach. The RLHG approach introduces a "baseline", which corresponds to the extent to which humans primitively achieve their goals, and encourages agents to learn behaviors that can effectively enhance humans in achieving their goals better. We evaluate the RLHG agent in the popular Multi-player Online Battle Arena (MOBA) game, Honor of Kings, by conducting real-world human-agent tests. Both objective performance and subjective preference results show that the RLHG agent provides participants better gaming experience.
Reyhaneh Hosseininejad, Megh Shukla, Saeed Saadatnejad
et al.
Human pose forecasting is inherently multimodal since multiple futures exist for an observed pose sequence. However, evaluating multimodality is challenging since the task is ill-posed. Therefore, we first propose an alternative paradigm to make the task well-posed. Next, while state-of-the-art methods predict multimodality, this requires oversampling a large volume of predictions. This raises key questions: (1) Can we capture multimodality by efficiently sampling a smaller number of predictions? (2) Subsequently, which of the predicted futures is more likely for an observed pose sequence? We address these questions with MotionMap, a simple yet effective heatmap based representation for multimodality. We extend heatmaps to represent a spatial distribution over the space of all possible motions, where different local maxima correspond to different forecasts for a given observation. MotionMap can capture a variable number of modes per observation and provide confidence measures for different modes. Further, MotionMap allows us to introduce the notion of uncertainty and controllability over the forecasted pose sequence. Finally, MotionMap captures rare modes that are non-trivial to evaluate yet critical for safety. We support our claims through multiple qualitative and quantitative experiments using popular 3D human pose datasets: Human3.6M and AMASS, highlighting the strengths and limitations of our proposed method. Project Page: https://vita-epfl.github.io/MotionMap
Leandro Martín Pérez, Carolina Acosta Hospitaleche, Lucía Elena Gómez-Peral
et al.
Trace elements, particularly rare earth elements (REE), are widely used as proxies to reconstruct paleoenvironmental and taphonomic conditions. We traced these elements in fossil penguin bones collected along the Paleogene sequence exposed in Seymour Island (=Isla Marambio) to test them as indicators of the tectonic changes to which this region was exposed. The results indicated the contents of REE in thirteen samples of the analyzed bone tissues. The negative europium anomaly in the samples from Bartonian and Priabonian beds reflects regional events. This signal coincides in time with the opening of the Drake Passage, and with the tectonic changes that occurred between the end of the Eocene and the beginning of the Oligocene, between the western margin of South America and the Antarctic Peninsula.
Torsten M. Scheyer, Nicole Klein, Serjoscha W. Evers
et al.
Abstract Proganochelys quenstedtii represents the best-known stem turtle from the Late Triassic, with gross anatomical and internal descriptions of the shell, postcranial bones and skull based on several well-preserved specimens from Central European fossil locations. We here report on the first specimen of P. quenstedtii from the Late Triassic (Klettgau Formation) Frickberg near the town of Frick, Canton Aargau, Switzerland. Similar to other Late Triassic ‘Plateosaurus-bearing bonebeds’, Proganochelys is considered to be a rare faunal element in the Swiss locality of Frick as well. The specimen, which is largely complete but was found only partially articulated and mixed with large Plateosaurus bones, overall resembles the morphology of the classical specimens from Germany. Despite being disarticulated, most skull bones could be identified and micro-computed tomography (CT) scanning of the posterior skull region reveals new insights into the braincase and neurovascular anatomy, as well as the inner ear region. These include the presence of a fenestra perilymphatica, potentially elongated cochlear ducts, and intense vascularization of small tubercles on the posterior end of the skull roof, which we interpret as horn cores. Other aspects of the skull in the braincase region, such as the presence or absence of a supratemporal remain ambiguous due to the fusion of individual bones and thus lack of visible sutures (externally and internally). Based on the size of the shell and fusion of individual elements, the specimen is interpreted as a skeletally mature animal.
Werner Schwarzhans, Oleksandr Klots, Tamara Ryabokon
et al.
Abstract The Medobory Hills barrier reef in western Ukraine represents a unique environment during the late Badenian that existed for a relatively brief time. Here, we describe 170 specimens of otoliths and scarce skeletal elements that were collected in the back-reef environment of the central part of the barrier reef in the city of Horodok. They represent a rare window into a reef-associated bony fish fauna. The otolith assemblage is very diverse and differs in several aspects from time-equivalent otolith associations described from other regions and environments within the former Paratethys. The Medobory back-reef otolith assemblage is dominated by a highly diverse gobioid community, several of which are believed to reflect specific reef adaptations that have not been identified elsewhere. A total of 26 species have been identified, of which eight are described as new, including two new genera. In the order in which they are described, the new taxa are as follows: Gobiidae: Gobius bratishkoi n. sp., Gobius ukrainicus n. sp., Parenypnias n. gen. inauditus n. sp., Parenypnias n. gen. kiselevi n. sp., Medoborichthys n. gen. podolicus n. sp., and Medoborichthys n. gen. renesulcis n. sp.; Blenniidae: Blennius vernyhorovae n. sp.; and Labridae: Coris medoboryensis n. sp. The environmental implications of the otolith-based fish fauna are discussed, and a supraregional correlation of late Badenian otolith associations throughout the Paratethys is presented. ZooBank LSID: urn:lsid:zoobank.org:pub:BFD6A482-A250-4603-AD60-D94E7756D4FB https://zoobank.org/72CECD6E-B1C3-49FF-AFE1-C542140706D0 .
Wade W. Leibach, Rudy Lerosey-Aubril, Anna F. Whitaker
et al.
The middle Marjum Formation is one of five Miaolingian Burgess Shale-type deposits in Utah, USA. It preserves a diverse non-biomineralized fossil assemblage, which is dominated by panarthropods and sponges. Infaunal components are particularly rare, and are best exemplified by the poorly diverse scalidophoran fauna and the uncertain presence of palaeoscolecids amongst it. To date, only a single Marjum Formation fossil has been tentatively assigned to the palaeoscolecid taxon Scathascolex minor. This specimen and two recently collected worm fragments were analysed in this study using scanning electron microscopy and energy dispersive X-ray spectrometry. The previous occurrence of a Marjum Formation palaeoscolecid is refuted based on the absence of sclerites in the specimen, which we tentatively assign to an unidentified species of Ottoia. The two new fossils, however, are identified as a new palaeoscolecid taxon, Arrakiscolex aasei gen. et sp. nov., characterized by the presence of hundreds of size-constrained (20–30 μm), smoothrimmed, discoid plates on each annulus. This is the first indisputable evidence for the presence of palaeoscolecids in the Marjum biota, and a rare occurrence of the group in the Cambrian of Laurentia. Palaeoscolecids are now known from nine Cambrian Stage 3–Guzhangian localities in Laurentia, but they typically represent rare components of the biotas.
Christian Klug, Abdelouahed Lagnaoui, Melina Jobbins
et al.
Abstract Trace fossils occur in several strata of the Devonian and Carboniferous of the eastern Anti-Atlas, but they are still poorly documented. Here, we describe a fossil swimming trace from strata overlying the Hangenberg Black Shale (correlation largely based on lithostratigraphy; Postclymenia ammonoid genozone, ca. 370 Ma old). We discuss the systematic position of the tracemaker and its body size. This ichnofossil is important for three main reasons: (1) it is considered here to be the first record of Undichna from the Devonian of Gondwana, as far as we know; (2) it is the oldest record of vertebrate trace fossils from Africa; (3) it provides a unique window into the behaviour of Late Devonian fishes for which body-fossils cannot provide direct evidence. Further, we put this discovery into the macroecological context of the palaeoenvironment following the Late Devonian Hangenberg biodiversity crisis.
Alberto Boscaini, Marina Peralta Gavensky, Gerardo De Iuliis
et al.
Florentino Ameghino was among the most prolific and influential paleontologists of South America. He left a vast body of scientific work, of considerable relevance even today, but also many open questions related to his enigmatic life and personality. One of these obscure aspects has surely been the absence of reliable geographical and chronological information on his birth. For more than a century, the main hypothesis was that Ameghino was born in the city of Luján (Province of Buenos Aires, Argentina) on the 18th of September, 1854. However, recent evidence reveals that Ameghino was undoubtedly born in Moneglia (Liguria, northwestern Italy) on the 19th of September, 1853. The reasons for this prolonged debate may lie in the intentional concealment of this information by Ameghino himself, but also in the ideological exploitation that shaped his persona after his death. This new evidence, far from being merely of passing interest, is here presented and analyzed, allowing new light to be shed on the life, personality, and sociohistorical context of Florentino Ameghino.