Patterns of Raccoon Craniodental Morphology under Urbanization
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Urbanization is one of the fastest and most extreme processes creating novel conditions and affecting persistence of animals in the Anthropocene. Documenting behavioral and morphological changes in urban wildlife is difficult because few studies account for non-urban sources of variation. As a result, multiple hypotheses have emerged. These hypotheses implicate the influence of cognitive demands (cognitive buffer hypothesis), human-wildlife interactions (self-domestication hypothesis), and diet (diet composition hypothesis) on morphology under urban conditions. We investigated craniodental morphological change in raccoons (Procyon lotor) with 98 specimens collected across the continental USA based on these hypotheses. Raccoons occur in rural and urban habitats, facilitating the exploration of these hypotheses in a single species under multiple conditions. Using modeling of linear measures, as well as 3-dimensional meshes and geometric analysis, and stable isotope diet estimation, we found that the occlusal area of the first molars and mandibular fourth premolar, in addition to the cranial vault shape, were most responsive to urbanization. Rostral shape showed limited variation across the urban and ecological gradients. Some structures, while variable, did not respond to any of the predictors tested. Our results provide the highest support to the self-domestication hypothesis, although multiple other pressures co-occur, including effects of sex, age, individual size, and geography. Our results also suggest that some craniodental structures may be evolutionarily fixed and promote the raccoon's generalist ecology.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.000 |
| 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) | 0.001 | 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 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".