What’s the story?
A team of researchers has developed Artificial intelligence (AI) DinoTracker is an app that can analyze dinosaur footprints. This innovative tool works by analyzing the shape of a footprint and matching it to other known imprints. For this process, minutes National Academy of Sciences By Professor Steve Brusatte and colleagues at the University of Edinburgh.
DinoTracker’s unique approach
Unlike previous AI systems that learned from labeled footprints, the team behind DinoTracker fed the system with 2,000 unlabeled silhouette imprints. The AI then determined how similar or different these traces were by analyzing a set of features identified as meaningful. These eight characteristics reflect changes in the shape of the imprint, including toe spread, ground contact area, and heel position.
Tools for exploring dinosaur footprints
The researchers converted the AI system into a free app called DinoTracker. The app allows users to upload a silhouette of a footprint, discover seven similar ones, and manipulate the original to see how variations in the eight features affect the similarity. This interactive feature helps users understand how different factors affect footprint classification and identification.
Accuracy and implications for paleontology
DinoTracker’s AI system matches human experts’ classifications about 90% of the time when factors such as the footprint of the material created and its age match scientific hypotheses. The tool also confirmed previous paleontological findings that a set of footprints from the Triassic and early Jurassic periods are strikingly bird-like, despite being 60 million years older than the oldest known bird skeleton.
evolutionary influence
DinoTracker’s discovery challenges traditional views on bird evolution
Bird-like footprints could mean that birds have a much older and deeper ancestry than previously thought, potentially stretching back tens of millions of years earlier than believed. But Professor Brusatte suspects that these footprints were made by carnivorous dinosaurs with very bird-like feet, perhaps their ancestors but not real birds. This suggests that the origins of avian traits may be more complex than previously understood.