Skull ontogeny of the pronghorn (<i>Antilocapra</i> <i>americana</i>) in the comparative context of native North American ungulates
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The pronghorn (Antilocapra americana (Ord, 1815)) is the single survivor of a largely extinct, isolated pecoran lineage (Antilocapridae) native to North America. We describe postnatal ontogeny of its skull in a comparative framework inclusive of representatives of other typical North American ungulate linages, all of which partially overlap in geographic distribution and share habitat with A. americana. To describe allometric growth, we took 23 linear cranial measurements in 30 specimens of A. americana and applied bi- and multi-variate statistics. The skull of A. americana generally grew with negative rates in width and height dimensions, and with positive rates in length, including an elongation of rostrum, particularly the nasals, and a relative narrowing of the braincase. We compared skull development in A. americana with development in two cervids (white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus (Zimmermann, 1780)) and wapiti (Cervus canadensis Erxleben, 1777)) and two bovids (bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis Shaw, 1804) and American bison (Bison bison (Linnaeus, 1758))). The multivariate ontogenetic trajectory of A. americana overlapped greatly with that of Odocoileus virginianus, and differed from the other species in varying degrees. These results indicated an essentially convergent pattern of skull growth with species showing important functional similarities, such as cervids of comparable size and feeding habits.
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.
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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 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".