New late Paleocene (late middle Tiffanian) mammals from the Roche Percée local fauna, south-eastern Saskatchewan, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
An exceptionally large and diverse assemblage of mammals from the early late Paleocene (about 58 million years ago) has been collected from the Ravenscrag Formation near Roche Percée, south-eastern Saskatchewan, Canada. Previous research of the Roche Percée local fauna has examined only a small portion of the mammals, with the vast majority of taxa remaining unstudied. Identification and descriptions of these latter taxa are provided here. With these new additions, the assemblage is now known to include 44 mammalian species. Notable among these findings is the substantial collection of the erinaceomorph lipotyphlan Litocherus lacunatus, the remarkable diversity of viverravid carnivorans, and the recovery of some of the first known elements of the upper dentition of the pantolestid Besseocetor pilodontus. A complete description of the mammalian fauna supports previous assignments of a late middle Tiffanian North American Land Mammal Age (Ti4 lineage zone) to the Roche Percée local fauna. Faunal comparisons further suggest a close similarity of the Roche Percée assemblage to the near contemporaneous Divide Quarry local fauna from the Bighorn Basin, northern Wyoming, but also reveal some similarities to slightly older middle Tiffanian local faunas (Ti3 lineage zone) at localities in the Paskapoo Formation of central Alberta. The specimens from the Roche Percée local fauna represent the largest and most taxonomically diverse assemblage of late middle Tiffanian mammals yet known, offering a unique perspective on mammalian evolution and diversity in North America during this time interval.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".