Recovery of novel osteological specimens ( <i>Mammuthus</i> ) from the Mammoth Site of Hot Springs, South Dakota, <scp>USA</scp>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Mammoth Site of Hot Springs, South Dakota, USA, is a Pleistocene locality best known for its Columbian mammoth (Mammuthus columbi) remains which were trapped, buried, and preserved in a sinkhole more than 130,000 years ago. Over the past 50 years, more than 5000 specimens have been excavated, many of which remain in situ. In the summers of 2023 and 2024, two unique specimens were excavated from the bonebed: a segment of "predigit" (an ossified, formerly cartilaginous rod of the fat pad), likely a distal prehallux, and a fused proximal sesamoid pair from the digits. Despite both phenomena being well documented in extant elephants, we report the first record of those elements, to our knowledge, in extinct elephants. This finding supports the prediction that "predigit" sesamoids are ancestral for crown group elephants, reflecting the ancient nature of the singular form and function of the feet in proboscideans, related to supporting these giant animals on land.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".