First taeniodonts (Mammalia, Taeniodonta) from the Paleocene of Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Taeniodonta comprise one of several groups of eutherians that diversified following the extinction of non-avian dinosaurs, and were among the earliest to achieve a relatively large body in the wake of the mass extinction some 66 million years ago. The fossil record of Taeniodonta is sparse, with much of what is known of their evolution being derived from specimens of early Paleocene age from the San Juan Basin of New Mexico. The record is particularly poor at higher latitudes, and while Schowalteria clemensi—the oldest taeniodont, known from but one specimen from southeastern Alberta—lived alongside dinosaurs and a suite of archaic mammals near the end of the Cretaceous, specimens referable to the order have heretofore not been discovered in Paleocene deposits in Canada, despite nearly 60 years of intensive collecting. I report here on the first evidence of taeniodonts from the Paleocene of western Canada, a record that includes representatives of both families (Huerfanodon, a conoryctid, and Psittacotherium, a stylinodontid). The new records demonstrate not only that taeniodonts occurred at higher latitudes during the early part of the Paleocene in North America, but were exceedingly rare, in keeping with their known occurrences elsewhere. Although taeniodont ecology has been invoked as a possible explanation for their rarity, the comparably sparse records of other large- and small-bodied mammals in local faunas of Paleocene age throughout the Western Interior suggest that taphonomic processes may have played the more significant role.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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".