Taxonomic revision of the long-tailed shrew, Sorex dispar Batchelder, 1911, from the Appalachian Region of North America, with the description of a new subspecies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The long-tailed shrew, Sorex dispar Batchelder, 1911, and Gaspe shrew, S. gaspensis Anthony and Goodwin, 1924, from the Appalachian Mountains of North America have been characterized as genetically highly similar, and that one is morphologically a clinal variate of the other, i.e., there is a single species. I measured 24 characters of the skull on 196 shrews from throughout the range of the species. Geographic variation in skull shape and size was not gradual or continuous, but abrupt. These abrupt changes in morphology are associated with major water barriers, primarily the Connecticut River, middle Saint John River, and the Strait of Canso, which separates mainland Nova Scotia from Cape Breton Island. The morphological analyses presented here and previous genetic studies indicate that S. dispar and S. gaspensis are likely conspecific. Shrews with the largest skull occur from North Carolina north to Vermont and are referable to S. d. dispar with S. d. blitchi as a synonym. Shrews from New Hampshire northeast to southern New Brunswick and mainland Nova Scotia have a medium-sized skull and are referable to a new subspecies. Those from northern New Brunswick, Gaspe Peninsula of Quebec, and Cape Breton Island have a small skull and are referable to S. d. gaspensis. The skull morphology of S. d. gaspensis and the new subspecies are more similar to each other than to S. d. dispar. Results of this study differ from those of previous morphological studies because measurement error and within-group variation were reduced, which allowed for visibility of otherwise “hidden” between-group differences, or geographic variation.
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".