Was the San Quintín kangaroo rat really rediscovered?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The San Quintín kangaroo rat ( Dipodomys gravipes Huey, 1925) is one of the three kangaroo rats in northwestern Baja California and the largest of them in most body dimensions. After a dramatic population decline in the 1980s, it was declared as potentially extinct in the wild by Mexican law. In 2017, the species was claimed to be rediscovered, but critical data supporting the species recognition were not provided. The question remained: Was the San Quintín kangaroo rat really rediscovered? We analyzed individuals identified by us as D. gravipes to validate our identification. We compared cranial morphometric and mitochondrial data of on-purpose collected specimens with those of historic specimens and with those of sympatric kangaroo rats in Baja California, particularly the Dulzura kangaroo rat ( Dipodomys simulans (Merriam, 1904)). Cranial morphometry and body dimensions of current specimens are indistinguishable from those of historic D. gravipes, while being different from D. simulans in most dimensions. External measurements such as cranial traits adequately distinguish both species. The mitochondrial analysis revealed strong support for the species grouping of sequences of our specimens and DNA sequences of D. gravipes from the GenBank repository. This study comprises a morphometric and molecular confirmation of the presence of the species after >25 years of failures to find it.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".