Taphonomic implication of ontogenetic distributions for field mice (Peromyscus SPP.) populations from two debris cone deposits, Parker’s Pit, Black Hills, South Dakota, USA
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Fossils accumulate in caves in multiple ways. Each introduces biases that must be understood before interpreting the assemblage. The ontogenetic age distributions of individual specimens of field mice, Peromyscus spp., based on tooth wear, provides insight into taphonomic pathways for two different talus deposits in Parker’s Pit, Black Hills, South Dakota. Main Cone accumulated under the modern 12 m vertical pit entrance throughout the Pleistocene and Holocene. The sink hole prohibits escape of randomly selected taxa. Red Cone formed as a talus slope in an old, now closed, entrance with a ramp-like slope that allowed animals to enter and exit the cave. Differences in ontogenetic age distributions between these two populations are statistically significant. Main Cone individuals show a wider and generally older age distribution than those from Red Cone. The older age distribution results from individuals surviving the vertical fall and living into old age in an essentially predator-free environment. These individuals probably subsisted on organic debris washed into the cave and resident invertebrates as observed in a living population of Peromyscus pectorralis in Longhorn Cavern, central Texas. The Red Cone population is ontogenetically younger, as exhibited by less dental wear, than the Main Cone population but slightly older than living populations studied in Washington, USA, and British Columbia, Canada. Bone damage indicative of predation by small carnivores, especially weasels (e.g., Mustela frenata) in the Red Cone sample is not apparent in the Main Cone population, reinforcing different taphonomic pathways of the two populations. The Red Cone sample is biased by predator selection. The Main Cone fossil assemblage likely represents a random, local sample of the biota around the cave that facilitates paleoecological analyses. The predator biased Red Cone sample is not amenable to reconstruction of communities but does provide insights into predator-prey interactions and selected species in the vicinity of the cave.
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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".