More bones of<i>Leptoptilos robustus</i>from Flores reveal new insights into giant marabou stork paleobiology and biogeography
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Liang Bua (Flores, Indonesia) has yielded remains of a faunal community that included small-bodied and small-brained hominins, dwarf proboscideans, Komodo dragons, vultures and giant marabou storks (Leptoptilos robustus). Previous research suggested thatL. robustusevolved from a smallerLeptoptilosdubius-like Middle Pleistocene ancestor and may have been flightless. However, analyses of this species' considerably expanded hypodigm (n= 43, MNI = 5), which includes 21 newly discovered bones described here for the first time, reveals that the wing bones ofL. robustuswere well-developed and this species was almost certainly capable of active flight. Moreover,L. robustusbones are broadly similar toLeptoptilos falconeriremains from sites in Africa and Eurasia, and its overall size range is comparable to fossils attributed toL. falconeriand similar specimens, as well as those ofLeptoptilos lüi(China) andLeptoptilos titan(Java). This suggests that a Pleistocene dispersal ofL. falconeriinto Island Southeast Asia may have given rise to populations of giant marabou storks in this region. AsL. robustusandL. titanare the most recent known representatives of these once plentiful giant marabou storks, Island Southeast Asia likely acted as a refugium for the last surviving members of this lineage.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 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) | 0.003 | 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 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".