CANADA'S FIRST KNOWN DINOSAURS: PALAEONTOLOGY AND COLLECTING HISTORY OF UPPER CRETACEOUS VERTEBRATES IN SOUTHERN ALBERTA AND SASKATCHEWAN, 1874–1889
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The early collecting history of dinosaurs and other fossil vertebrates in Western Canada during the 1870s and 1880s is poorly documented. Initial finds were made by the British North American Boundary Commission and the Geological Survey of Canada in modern Saskatchewan and Alberta but, beyond a few well-publicized examples, little is known about precisely what was found and where. Much of the collected material is now housed in the collections of the Canadian Museum of Nature in Gatineau, Quebec, and a recent survey of these historic finds allows for the first comprehensive narrative regarding their identity and procurement. The collection is heavily biased towards vertebral centra and phalanges, reflective of both taphonomic and collecting biases. Given current understanding of Upper Cretaceous assemblages of North America, ornithomimids and small theropods are overrepresented, whereas ceratopsids and ankylosaurs are underrepresented. Fossils from the Belly River Group are best represented, after repeated visits to the areas of present-day Dinosaur Provincial Park and Ross Coulee near Irvine, Alberta. Taxonomic identification of the material has yielded numerous first Canadian occurrences, in addition to some first global occurrences. The latter include the first ever occurrences of Caenagnathidae (1884) and Thescelosauridae (1889). The Upper Cretaceous fossil record of Western Canada is among the richest in the world, and has been thoroughly studied over the last century. These fossils have informed our understanding of dinosaur behaviour, taphonomy, ecology, diversity dynamics, and extinction, among other aspects. But, like the animals themselves, the story of Canada's dinosaur-hunting legacy had humble beginnings—a story that has not been fully revealed before now.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 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".