Migratory behavior in the enigmatic Late Pleistocene bovid Rusingoryx atopocranion
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For many animals, migration is an important strategy for navigating seasonal bottlenecks in resource availability. In the savannas of eastern Africa, herds of grazing animals, including blue wildebeest (Connochaetes taurinus), Thomson's gazelle (Eudorcas thomsonii), and plains zebra (Equus quagga), travel hundreds of kilometers annually tracking suitable forage and water. However, we know nearly nothing about migration among the extinct species that often dominated Late Pleistocene communities. Using serially sampled 87Sr/86Sr and δ13C, we characterize the prehistoric movement and diet of the enigmatic wildebeest Rusingoryx atopocranion from two localities (Karungu and Rusinga Island) in the Lake Victoria Basin of western Kenya. We find clear evidence for migration in all four individuals studied, with three 87Sr/86Sr series demonstrating high-amplitude fluctuations and all falling outside the modeled isoscape 87Sr/86Sr ranges of the fossil localities from which they were recovered. This suggests that R. atopocranion exhibited migratory behavior comparable to that of its closest living relatives in the genus Connochaetes. Additionally, individuals show seasonally-variable δ13C, with a higher browse intake than modern and fossil eastern African alcelaphins indicating behavioral differences among extinct taxa otherwise unrecognized by comparison with extant related species. That this species was highly migratory aligns with its morphology matching that of an open grassland migrant: it had open-adapted postcranial morphology along with a unique cranial structure convergent with lambeosaurine dinosaurs for calling long distances. We further hypothesize that its migratory behavior may be linked to its extinction, as R. atopocranion disappears from the Lake Victoria Basin fossil sequence coincident with the refilling of Lake Victoria sometime after 36 ka, potentially impeding its past migratory routes. This study characterizes migration in an extinct eastern African species for the first time and shapes our ecological understanding of this unique bovid and the ecosystems in which Middle Stone Age humans lived.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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) | 0.001 | 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".