Late Pleistocene records of felids from Medicine Hat, Alberta, including the first Canadian record of the sabre-toothed cat <i>Smilodon fatalis</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the late 1960s, a team led by C.S. Churcher and A. MacS. Stalker collected over 1000 vertebrate fossils, mostly representing large herbivorous mammals, from bluffs along the South Saskatchewan River near Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada. The records from this area also include the only documented case of the sabre-toothed cat Smilodon fatalis, but these specimens have not been described or illustrated, and therefore, their identification has never been verified. Here, all felid fossils recovered from the Medicine Hat bluffs are described and identified. We confirm the presence of the machairodontine S. fatalis and three additional taxa: the feline Lynx and the pantherines Panthera cf. P. atrox (American lion) and Panthera cf. P. spelaea (cave lion). Notably, this record of S. fatalis is its first confirmed occurrence in Canada and is a significant northerly range expansion, bringing the global distribution of this species in line with what is typical for a large felid. Should the tentative record of Panthera cf. P. spelaea be correct, this would represent its first occurrence in Alberta and a southeastern range extension, bringing it into the range of P. atrox. The possible presence of both P. atrox and P. spelaea suggests that Late Pleistocene pantherine biogeography in North America may be more complex than previously believed, particularly during relatively warm interglacial periods.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 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) | 0.002 | 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 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".