Humid mesothermal climate and open forest at the early Miocene Landslip Hill deposit (Gore Lignite Measures), Southern Zealandia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Plant fossils at the southern Zealandia Landslip Hill deposit (early Miocene , Gore Lignite Measures) are preserved in a silcrete matrix and reveal unique three-dimensional structures. Here, we present fossil leaf-based paleoclimate and vegetation reconstructions, as well as a comparison of the diversity at the site to modern New Zealand forests. The early Miocene climate at the site is much warmer than modern (mean annual temperature 17.6 ± 2.3 °C versus ∼10 °C today), but with similar annual precipitation rates (96 +67/-39 cm yr −1 versus ∼100 cm yr −1 today). Temperature seasonality is similar to today, whereas the locality experienced stronger precipitation seasonality, likely due to the southward migration of the moisture-laden westerly wind belt during early Miocene summers. The reconstructed vegetation at Landslip Hill does not tend towards resource retention strategies, like modern dense evergreen climax forest that exists under similar temperature and precipitation combinations in Zealandia today. Instead, the vegetation includes elements of open vegetation, with nearest living relatives of taxa identified at the site being notable post-disturbance taxa, such as Gleicheniaceae and Casuarinaceae . This indicates that the vegetation at Landslip Hill may have been periodically disturbed, potentially by floods, fire or both. Flood disturbance aligns well with the coarse sandstone facies of the deposit, and the lack of planar bedding in which the fossils are found. However, fire disturbance aligns well with the summer-dry conditions at the site. Overall dicot leaf diversity at Landslip Hill is similar to that of modern New Zealand forests, even those at the same depositional latitude (∼45–46°S); however, unlike modern New Zealand forests, there is no clear dominance of a single taxon.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".