TAPHONOMY OF THE STANDING ROCK HADROSAUR SITE, CORSON COUNTY, SOUTH DAKOTA
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract We present taphonomic analyses of the Standing Rock Hadrosaur Site (SRHS), a vast Edmontosaurus annectens bonebed in the Maastrichtian Hell Creek Formation of South Dakota, which yields important insights into hadrosaurid paleobiology and environmental settings recorded by basal Hell Creek strata. Though Edmontosaurus bonebeds have been described from other Late Cretaceous formations in the Western Interior, namely the Lance, Prince Creek, and Horseshoe Canyon formations, our study provides the first thorough description of an Edmontosaurus bonebed from the Hell Creek Formation. SRHS is also the first formally described bonebed of> E. annectens. Taphonomically, representation of every skeletal element, horizontality of most bones, and rarity of weathering and abrasion suggest brief preburial exposure and transport with minimal sorting bias. Near-universal disarticulation and disassociation, localized orientation of bones, and infrequent preburial breakage indicate moderate flow energy during deposition. Additional fauna, though rare, are indicative of a fluvial-coastal setting, and palynofloral analyses signify deposition in a small, shallow floodplain lake surrounded by cypress forests. Cumulatively, these data indicate that a herd of primarily subadult and adult Edmontosaurus died in a nearby fluvial setting in a mass mortality event and, following brief decay and scavenging by theropods, their bones were buried in a shallow floodplain pond by a flooding event/crevasse splay. Our findings provide supporting evidence for the hypotheses of gregarious herding behavior in hadrosaurids and age structuring of Edmontosaurus herds.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
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".