A Late Pleistocene Bird Community at the Northern Edge of the Tropics in Sonora, Mexico
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recently collected fossils from the late Pleistocene (Rancholabrean North American Land Mammal Age) locality at Térapa, Sonora, México, represent 31 species of non-passerine birds. Twenty-three of the species (74%) are aquatic (grebes, pelican, cormorant, herons, ibis, stork, geese, ducks, rails), reflecting the lacustrine environment (marsh, lake) in which the fossils accumulated. The eight non-aquatic species (harrier, kite, two eagles, caracara, quail, killdeer and owl) suggest habitats from grassland to open woodland to desertscrub to tropical thornscrub. Three species are certainly extinct (the duck Anabernicula cf. A. oregonensis, eagle Buteogallus (Wetmoregyps) daggetti and owl Strix brea). Only the owl has been recorded previously in Sonora. A species of large stork (Ciconiidae sp., genus uncertain) probably is extinct as well. Previously unrecorded in Sonora is a kite Ictinia sp. Among the 26 other species (all extant), four have no modern records within 100 km of Térapa (the ibis Plegadis cf. P. chihi, Canada Goose Branta canadensis, Common Moorhen Gallinula chloropus and Purple Gallinule Porphyrio martinicus). Although the non-passerine fossil bird community at Térapa is dominated by aquatic species with broad latitudinal and longitudinal ranges, five of the eight species of landbirds do not occur north of the southwestern U.S. or northern México. The subtropical biogeographic affinities of the Térapa birds agree with those suggested for the associated reptile and mammal fossils.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".