A new whitefish from the early Quaternary of Bluefish Basin, Yukon Territory, Canada, and its paleoenvironmental implications
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A nearly complete fossil of a whitefish, Coregonus beringiaensis sp. nov. (Salmoniformes: Salmonidae: Coregoninae), the oldest known record of the genus, is described from Ch’ijee’s Bluff along the Porcupine River, Bluefish Basin, Yukon Territory. The new species is closest to but distinct from species within the Coregonus clupeaformis complex, especially in its low lateral line scale count, quadrate with an extensive canal and pore complex, Y-shaped lachrymal, and a unique combination of counts and measurements of fins, scales, and body proportions. The stratigraphic position of the source concretionary layer, at the base of unit 3, a lacustrine unit, is well below a magnetically reversed interval thought to represent at least the upper part of the Matuyama Chron. The specimen was found above ice-wedge pseudomorphs thought to be the first sign of the onset of cold temperatures in the early Quaternary. The fossil is older than 0.79 Ma and probably younger than 2.58 Ma. Palynomorphs in the concretion suggest an open shrub-tundra environment and a climate colder than that of the present, similar to conditions prevailing at or above the tree line, and a good fit for preglacial conditions in the early Quaternary. Sedimentary and geochemical analyses suggest that fossilization occurred in an environment characterized by fine sedimentation in a cold, reducing milieu with a pH of ∼7.5. Alternatively, these conditions may reflect the postdepositional or early diagenetic environment. The lake in which the whitefish lived was possibly part of a hydrographic basin draining toward the Arctic Ocean.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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".