New pantolestids (Mammalia, Eutheria) from the late Paleocene (late middle Tiffanian) Roche Percée local fauna, southeastern Saskatchewan, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Pantolestidae are an extinct family of mammals known principally from the early Paleocene to late Oligocene (from approximately 64 to 30 million years ago) of North America and Europe. Although never particularly abundant, pantolestids are relatively well represented in the Eocene and Oligocene, with several taxa known from exceptionally well-preserved skulls and postcranial material. The early evolutionary history of the group, however, similar to that of many contemporaneous mammals, remains comparatively poorly known. The current study reports on several previously undescribed pantolestids from the early late Paleocene (late middle Tiffanian, Ti4) Roche Percée local fauna, Ravenscrag Formation, of southeastern Saskatchewan, Canada. Aatotomus placochton n. gen. n. sp. resembles the enigmatic pantolestid Paleotomus in having sectorial premolars with well-developed crests and tall, sharp molar trigonids, but differs principally in possessing narrow molar talonids. Besseocetor krausei n. sp. shares numerous similarities with B. thomsoni and B. septentrionalis but differs in being considerably smaller and less robust. Palaeosinopa reclusum n. sp., the oldest species of Palaeosinopa yet discovered, reveals a unique combination of primitive and derived pantolestid features, and supports previous suggestions of a close evolutionary relationship between Palaeosinopa and Bessoecetor . The new taxa document an unusually high diversity of pantolestids in the Tiffanian of western Canada and provide important new knowledge to the evolutionary history of this group during the Paleocene.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 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".