Some Birds of Prey from the Upper Pliocene of Kansas
Some birds of prey from the Upper Pliocene of Kansas.---Although many arian fossils from the local faunas of the Rexroad formation (Upper Pliocene), Meade County, Kansas, have now been reported, several species of birds of prey remain. These fossils, which Dr. C. W. Hibbard of The University of Michigan Museum of Paleontology a.nd his field parties collected, come from the Rexroad and Fox Canyon local faunas of the Rexroad formation. These two localities arc described by Hibbard (1950). The two local faunas have been treated as one in the past, but Hibbard's (1967) latest view is that they arc distinct. The Fox Canyon local fauna is now considered to be older than the Rexroad and is distinct on the basis of its small mammals (Hibbard, 1967). Birds have bccn reported previously from these local faunas by Wetmore (1944), Tordoff (1951, 1959), Brodkorb (1964, 1967), Collins (1964), Ford (1966), Murray (1967), a.nd Fcduccia (1967, 1968). The birds of prey represented arc as follows: Accipiter sp.---Two distal ends of tibiotarsi represent an accipitcr approximately the size of the Recent A. cooperi, but the clements arc not sufficiently diagnostic to warrant the naming of a new species or the definite assignment of the fossils to the Recent form. One bone, a 42-mm piece of the distal end of a left tibiotarsus (UMMP No. V57506, from the Rexroad local fau.na, loc. no. 3) measures 10.8 mm in width through condyles. The same measurement for eight specimens of Recent A. cooperi females gives a mcan of 10.1 mm, with a range of 9.2-10.9 mm. The smaller fossil, a 17.1-mm piece of the distal end of a left tibiotarsus (UMMP No. V45422, from the Rexroad local fauna, loc. UM-K3-53) measures 9.0 mm in width through condyles. The same measurement for five males of Recent A. cooperi gives a mean of 8.5 mm, with a range of 8.3-8.8 mm. Whether or not both fossils represent females or one a female and the other a male cannot bc dctcrmi.ned, but it is probably best to assume that only one species is represented. Buteo sp.--A fragment of a right coracold (UMMP No. V24767, from the Fox Canyon local fauna, loc. UM-K1-47) represents a large species of Buteo close in size and morphology to B. jamaicensis, but it is too fragmentary to permit allocation. No useful measurements could be taken.
REVISION OF "FALCO" RAMENTA WETMORE AND THE NEOGENE EVOLUTION OF THE FALCONIDAE
Falco" ramenta Wetmore 1936 is redescribed and moved to a new genus as Pedlofiierax ramenta (Wetmore). In addition to the holotypical distal end of the tarsometa- tarsus, this species is now known from a complete tarsometatarsus, humerus, and coracoid from mid-Miocene (Late Hemingfordian and Early Barstovian) fossil localities in the Sheep Creek and Olcott formations, northwestern Nebraska. Pediolfferax n. gen. is the primitive sister group of the Falconinae. The earliest fossil records now known of the Falconinae are a species of ?Falco from the late Miocene of Idaho and Falco medius from the late Miocene of the Ukrainian S.S.R. Received 5 June 1986, accepted 4 November 1986. WETMORE (1936) described "Falco" ramenta based on the distal end of a single right tarso- metatarsus from a mid-Miocene locality in Ne- braska. The holotype of this species apparently was compared only with Falco columbarius and F. sparverius, and differed from the former in having the distal vascular foramen of the tar- sometatarsus more elevated on the shaft in posterior view (Wetmore 1936). The incom- plete, minimally diagnostic nature of the ho- lotype has since caused the systematic position and validity of this species to be questioned (Jollie 1977). ! describe here new material from correlative mid-Miocene fossil localities in Nebraska of "Falco" ramenta, revise the systematic position of this species, document its stratigraphic range, and review all known Neogene records of the family Falconidae. MATERIAL AND METHODS
Towards infield, live plant phenotyping using a reduced-parameter CNN
There is an increase in consumption of agricultural produce as a result of the rapidly growing human population, particularly in developing nations. This has triggered high-quality plant phenotyping research to help with the breeding of high-yielding plants that can adapt to our continuously changing climate. Novel, low-cost, fully automated plant phenotyping systems, capable of infield deployment, are required to help identify quantitative plant phenotypes. The identification of quantitative plant phenotypes is a key challenge which relies heavily on the precise segmentation of plant images. Recently, the plant phenotyping community has started to use very deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to help tackle this fundamental problem. However, these very deep CNNs rely on some millions of model parameters and generate very large weight matrices, thus making them difficult to deploy infield on low-cost, resource-limited devices. We explore how to compress existing very deep CNNs for plant image segmentation, thus making them easily deployable infield and on mobile devices. In particular, we focus on applying these models to the pixel-wise segmentation of plants into multiple classes including background, a challenging problem in the plant phenotyping community. We combined two approaches (separable convolutions and SVD) to reduce model parameter numbers and weight matrices of these very deep CNN-based models. Using our combined method (separable convolution and SVD) reduced the weight matrix by up to 95% without affecting pixel-wise accuracy. These methods have been evaluated on two public plant datasets and one non-plant dataset to illustrate generality. We have successfully tested our models on a mobile device.