A comprehensive identification protocol for postcranial bones of Southeast Asian Ruminantia. Part 3: Morphological criteria for large-sized species

A morphology-based protocol for six mainland large ruminants uses 148 characters across 27 elements from 109 skeletons, achieving up to 95% accuracy at family rank.

• Why it matters: Late Quaternary postcranial bones in continental Southeast Asia are abundant but often hard to assign to species, limiting zooarchaeological interpretation in a region with high ruminant diversity.
• What they did: The authors defined 148 discrete osteological characters (442 states) on a restricted set, scored them across the full comparative sample, then tested random forest and naive Bayes classifiers at four taxonomic ranks.
• The result: Mean accuracies were 95–94% (families), 93% (subfamilies), 89% (genera), and 76% (species), with Bos species showing the least consistent separation; weighted naive Bayes is released as a web app.

AI summary of the abstract · may contain errors · not medical advice · read the paper.