Conservation of Subfossil Bones from a Lacustrine Setting: Uncontrolled and Controlled Drying of Late Quaternary Vertebrate Remains from Cold Lake, Western Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Water-saturated vertebrate remains (e.g., bone, antler, and ivory) are particularly challenging to stabilize for long-term storage, research, and analysis. These types of specimens are sensitive to damage caused by water loss, which frequently results in delamination, twisting, and cracking. The recovery of late Quaternary vertebrate remains from underwater areas of Cold Lake, western Canada, prompted us to conduct a series of analyses to better understand the preservation of the remains and their susceptibility to damage, and to test different conservation techniques to achieve successful drying. X-ray fluorescence analysis of a sample of specimens revealed that the remains have particularly high iron concentrations, a condition that might have contributed to weaken their structure, further compromising their integrity when drying. Additionally, we found that certain bone elements, such as long bones, are more susceptible to severe surface delamination than others, and as a result these specimens should be monitored more closely during their treatment. Of the four drying methods we tested, controlled air-drying produced the best results, followed by solvent-drying. In contrast, vacuum freeze-drying and vacuum freeze-drying with 20% v/v Acrysol WS-24 in water, an acrylic dispersion, while rapid, resulted in differing degrees of delamination and cracking.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".