What do we know about dinosaurs? This AI app can help you identify one

Scientists turn their findings into an AI-powered app made to educate users on dinosaurs.

It would be hard to find a niche where AI isn’t used yet. Recently, researchers created an app that can help recognize dinosaurs by scanning the footprints they left millions of years ago.

While AI has already been used to identify different types of dinosaurs, the scientists behind this research note that if these footprints are mislabeled, the AI system would then also provide incorrect data.

Considering this, Dr Gregor Hartmann from Helmholtz-Zentrum in Germany, together with scientists from the University of Edinburgh, provided their AI system with 2,000 unlabelled footprint silhouettes.

The system was capable of finding differences and similarities between these prints based on features it considered meaningful.

The scientists found these eight features and how they vary in imprints, differing in shape, toe spread, and heel position.

They then created DinoTracker, an app where users can upload a shape of a dinosaur footprint to see how similar it is to other footprints, and change the footprint using those eight features to get new results showing which other prints are similar to the one they uploaded.

This is how users can learn how different factors impact footprint identification and classification.

It’s been reported that DinoTracker matches human expert classifications around 90% of the time.

The system also supports previous paleontological findings stating that a set of footprints from the Triassic and early Jurassic is “birdlike,” despite being 60 million years older than the oldest bird skeletons.

This could indicate that birds have a much older past than thought, going back tens of millions of years, notes Professor Stephen L. Brusatte via The Guardian.

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