Taxonomy, location of origin and health status of proboscideans from Western Canada investigated using stable isotope analysis
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT We investigated the application of stable isotope analysis of proboscidean remains (collagen in bone/dentin/cementum and structural carbonate in enamel bioapatite) for genus‐level identification of isolated specimens, assessment of geographical origins, and testing for nutritional stress. Mammoths ( Mammuthus sp.) tended to have higher δ 15 N col and lower δ 13 C col than mastodons ( Mammut americanum ), but differences were not significant in every location. Determining the genus of isolated specimens may be possible for locations and time periods with good isotopic baselines, but environmental changes can confound interpretations. For example, an Alberta proboscidean with a δ 15 N col of +1.4‰ (characteristic of mastodons) ultimately proved to be a mammoth. Its surprisingly low nitrogen isotope composition is attributable to the recently deglaciated environment it inhabited. We provided a baseline for isotopic assessment of geographical origins of isolated proboscideans in Western Canada. Bioapatite δ 13 C sc and δ 18 O sc can be used to distinguish specimens from Alberta, Klondike, Old Crow, Herschel Island and further south (e.g. Arizona, Great Lakes). Finally, we found that an Alberta mammoth with morphological evidence of nutritional stress experienced a change in diet, environment or physiology before death, but its isotopic compositions did not suggest a link to hypothesized starvation (catabolism of proteins or reliance on lipids).
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 it