Mitogenomic analysis of a late Pleistocene jaguar from North America
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The jaguar (Panthera onca) is the largest living cat species native to the Americas and one of few large American carnivorans to have survived into the Holocene. However, the extent to which jaguar diversity declined during the end-Pleistocene extinction event remains unclear. For example, Pleistocene jaguar fossils from North America are notably larger than the average extant jaguar, leading to hypotheses that jaguars from this continent represent a now-extinct subspecies (Panthera onca augusta) or species (Panthera augusta). Here, we used a hybridization capture approach to recover an ancient mitochondrial genome from a large, late Pleistocene jaguar from Kingston Saltpeter Cave, Georgia, United States, which we sequenced to 26-fold coverage. We then estimated the evolutionary relationship between the ancient jaguar mitogenome and those from other extinct and living large felids, including multiple jaguars sampled across the species' current range. The ancient mitogenome falls within the diversity of living jaguars. All sampled jaguar mitogenomes share a common mitochondrial ancestor ~400 thousand years ago, indicating that the lineage represented by the ancient specimen dispersed into North America from the south at least once during the late Pleistocene. While genomic data from additional and older specimens will continue to improve understanding of Pleistocene jaguar diversity in the Americas, our results suggest that this specimen falls within the variation of extant jaguars despite the relatively larger size and geographic location and does not represent a distinct taxon.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 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) | 0.002 | 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 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".