WASHINGTON, Feb 6 (Reuters) – Footprints are among the most common dinosaur fossils. Sometimes scientists find a single, solitary footprint. Other times, they come across a chaotic jumble of footsteps that resemble a dance floor, a kind of dinosaur disco. But identifying which dinosaur left which footprint has been notoriously difficult.
Researchers have now developed a method that uses artificial intelligence to help identify the type of dinosaur responsible for the footprints, based on eight different characteristics of a given footprint.
“This is important because it provides an objective way to classify and compare footprints, reducing dependence on subjective human interpretation,” said physicist Gregor Hartmann of the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin research center in Germany, lead author of the research published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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“Matching footprints to their creators is a huge challenge, and paleontologists have been arguing about it for generations,” said University of Edinburgh paleontologist and senior author of the study, Steve Brusatte.
Dinosaurs left behind several types of fossilized remains, including bones, teeth and claws, impressions of their skin, feces and vomit, undigested remains in their stomachs, eggshells and nest remains. But footprints are often more abundant and can reveal a lot of information to scientists, including the type of environment a dinosaur lived in and, when other footprints are present, the types of animals that shared an ecosystem.
The new method was refined by the algorithm’s analysis of 1,974 footprint silhouettes spanning 150 million years of dinosaur history, with the AI discerning eight features that explained variation in the shapes of these footprints.
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These characteristics included: overall load and shape, reflecting the foot’s contact area with the ground; the position of the load; the distance between the fingers; how the fingers connect to the foot; the position of the heel; the load of the heel; the relative emphasis of the fingers in relation to the heel; and the shape discrepancy between the left and right sides of the footprint.
Many of the footprints had already been confidently identified by experts as belonging to a specific type of dinosaur. After the algorithm identified the differentiating features, experts mapped out how they corresponded to the various types of dinosaurs believed to have made the tracks, in order to guide the identification of future tracks.
“The problem is that identifying who made a fossilized footprint is inherently uncertain,” Hartmann said.
“The shape of a footprint depends on many factors beyond the animal itself, including what the dinosaur was doing at the time, such as walking, running, jumping or even swimming, the moisture and type of substrate (soil surface), how the footprint was buried by sediment, and how it was altered by erosion over millions of years. As a result, the same dinosaur can leave very different-looking footprints,” Hartmann added.
