Evolution of woodcutting behaviour in Early Pliocene beaver driven by consumption of woody plants
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Modern beavers ( Castor ) are prolific ecosystem engineers and dramatically alter the landscape through tree harvesting and dam building. Little is known, however, about the evolutionary drivers of their woodcutting behaviour. Here we investigate if early woodcutting behaviour in Castoridae was driven by nutritional needs. We measured stable carbon and nitrogen isotopes ( δ 13 C and δ 15 N) of coeval subfossil plants and beaver collagen ( Dipoides sp.) from the Early Pliocene, High Arctic Beaver Pond fossil locality (Ellesmere Island), in order to reconstruct Dipoides sp. diet. Isotopic evidence indicates a diet of woody plants and freshwater macrophytes, supporting the hypothesis that this extinct semiaquatic beaver engaged in woodcutting behaviour for feeding purposes. In a phylogenetic context, the isotopic evidence implies that woodcutting and consumption of woody plants can be traced back to a small-bodied, semiaquatic Miocene castorid, suggesting that beavers have been consuming woody plants for over 20 million years. We propose that the behavioural complex (swimming, woodcutting, and consuming woody plants) preceded and facilitated the evolution of dam building. Dam building and food caching behaviours appear to be specializations for cold winter survival and may have evolved in response to late Neogene northern cooling.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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".