New Studies on the Gaits Displayed by Miocene, Pliocene, and Pleistocene Fossil Horse Trackways
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The authors here apply a refined methodology to determine the gaits of fossil equids. Miocene trackways of Cremohipparion near Jumilla, Spain, contain three sets of tracks of equids trotting at around 2.9–3.4 m/s, crossed by another three sets of tracks of perhaps younger equids at play galloping at around 5.2–5.6 m/s. Other Miocene trackways include three sets of Hippotherium near Osoppo, Italy, galloping at around 6.2–6.5 m/s, and one of Scaphohippus from Barstow, California, in the United States, likely engaged in a rack (or less likely a trot) at 2.1 m/s. Pliocene trackways include one Hipparion near Elche, Spain, trotting at around 3.5 m/s, and three trackways of Eurygnathohippus from Laetoli, Tanzania, of equids racking (with one perhaps engaged in a running walk) at around 2.1–3.1 m/s, including tracks of what is likely a foal being supervised by its mare. Finally, a Pleistocene trackway of Equus near Cardston, Alberta, Canada, shows a horse in a gallop at around 6.6 m/s. Hence, Miocene to Pleistocene fossil trackways reveal that equids in the past possessed standard gaits (trot, gallop) as well as alternative lateral gaits (rack), and had similar herding behaviors found in modern horses today.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| 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".