There’s a lot of guesswork involved in identifying a dinosaur footprint. The foot itself, the ground it left an imprint on, and the dinosaur’s movement all distort its identity. A new AI-powered app wants to make that guessing game a little less subjective.
Researchers from the University of Edinburgh and Helmholtz-Zentrum in Germany have developed DinoTracker, a free app that uses artificial intelligence to analyze dinosaur footprints without assuming which species made them. Older AI systems were trained on tracks that humans had already labeled, which may be wrong, since dinosaurs rarely leave their signatures and two forms of identification next to their footprints.
The team fed the system 2,000 unlabeled footprint silhouettes and let the AI sort them based on similarities it identified on its own. It focused on eight key features, including toe spread, heel position, and how much of the foot contacted the ground—all the stuff humans can easily get wrong if they’re just eyeballing it.
It all comes together to identify footprint clusters that match expert classifications about 90 percent of the time.
An App Is Helping Scientists Identify Dinosaur Tracks (and You Can Use It Too)
DinoTracker lets users upload a footprint, compare it to similar tracks, and even tweak those eight features to see how small changes alter the results. Human experts still have to check things like age and sediment type, but the app acts as a solid second opinion. While not yet quite elevated to the level of an expert’s take, it is a result informed heavily by experts.
Members of the app’s development team, speaking to The Guardian, say it’s already reaching conclusions similar to those of the wider paleontological community, using only the data it was trained on.
For instance, you probably heard by now that dinosaurs and birds are closely related. This is a theory that paleontologists have long held, based on the fact that dinosaur tracks from the Triassic and early Jurassic look a lot like bird feet, despite being tens of millions of years older than the earliest known bird fossils.
The AI agrees, though no one is using this as 100 percent confirmation of anything just yet, because this nifty little AI tool isn’t going to be definitively solving any dinosaur mysteries on its own. But it might help get closer than ever.
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