Elephant dung, chewed antlers, weathered bones: documenting a unique taphonomic collection
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Antony John Sutcliffe Collection is a unique taphonomic reference collection held within the Department of Earth Sciences at the Natural History Museum (NHM). Sutcliffe was the Curator of Fossil Mammal at the NHM from 1957 to 1987, during which time he collected a large assemblage of modern comparative vertebrate material, including complete skulls, bones, teeth and soft tissues (skin and faeces) of numerous species from across the world including sites in East Africa, Canada, Alaska, Siberia and northwest Europe. Sutcliffe studied Pleistocene mammals and was particularly interested in the alterations to their remains after death and how they come to be fossilised, i.e., their taphonomy. The specimens were either collected during Sutcliffe’s own fieldwork or gifted to him by international colleagues, and are often accompanied by detailed notes on their provenance and original letters of donation. After a preliminary study in 2013, and given the value of the collection for future taphonomic studies, a curatorial project ran from 2015 to 2017 aiming to document the entire collection on EMu (the museum’s collection management system), recording the anatomy, taxonomy, previous and new locations within the museum, and any associated documentation of over 1500 specimens. Photographs of each object were included and all specimens have been registered, safely repacked and rehoused at Wandsworth museum store, where they are now accessible to researchers. The specimens have the potential to form curated taphonomic reference standards for use by researchers around the world.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.002 |
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".