The relative importance of body size, phylogeny, locomotion, and diet in the evolution of forelimb dexterity in fissiped carnivores (Carnivora)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Using a new rating scale of forelimb dexterity that separates the contribution of proximal components (shoulder, upper forelimb, and lower forelimb) from distal components (forepaw), we examined the relationship between functional demands and phylogeny and forelimb dexterity in 45 species of fissiped carnivores (Carnivora). Specifically, we examined the effects of body size, phylogenetic relatedness, diet (vertebrate predation), and locomotion (arboreality) on the differential evolution of forelimb dexterity. Regression analyses indicate that, although body size does appear to be positively correlated with the dexterity of the proximal components, the inclusion of phylogenetic information results in a nonsignificant relationship. Phylogenetic relatedness was found to account for a significant amount of interspecific variation in proximal, distal, and total (proximal + distal) dexterity. When phylogenetic effects were incorporated, arboreality was not significantly correlated with any of the dexterity scores, but vertebrate predation was, albeit a negative correlation. The amount of variation in the dexterity of proximal and distal components did, however, differ in magnitude within each significant result. Thus, each component can be differentially affected by specific functional demands. By examining the significant associations with diet and phylogeny and mapping the dexterity scores onto the phylogeny, we also demonstrate that the ancestral degree of forelimb dexterity of both the caniform and feliform lineages was approximately equal to that of the average extant carnivore. Thus, forelimb dexterity has decreased or increased within particular lineages, with reductions or elaborations in some species resulting from the invasion of specific niches not occupied by congeners.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".