Mysterious ancient teeth were found in three English counties - Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire, and Dorset. A new study used machine learning techniques to identify the owner of the teeth, and the results suggest it was from a massive herbivore dinosaur.
Therizinosaur Dinosaurs Own Mysterious Teeth
Researchers from the Natural History Museum and Birkbeck College identified the strange teeth, some of which were discovered as recently as the 1970s and others more recently, with cutting-edge machine learning techniques, Daily Mail reported.
However, according to lead researcher Simon Wills, a Ph.D. student at the Natural History Museum, the actual fossil evidence was sparse and disputed. Previous studies had suggested that the maniraptorans were present in the Middle Jurassic.
The discovery and fossils found elsewhere indicate that by this time, the group had already attained a global spread.
The teeth examined include the only troodontid and therizinosaur fossils ever recorded from the UK and are the oldest evidence of these dinosaurs anywhere in the world," the study's authors write.
Researchers have tried to categorize isolated teeth using different statistical techniques in the past, but they haven't always been very successful.
For this reason, the researchers have been attempting to improve machine learning technologies like the one they employed.
Though its application is expanding, Wills noted that machine learning in vertebrate paleontology is still in its infancy.
The critical problem is that the models need a large training dataset to learn from. Fortunately, they have access to a sizable dataset of measurements of dinosaur teeth for their work, which they could use to train the models.
For the AI to comprehend the fossil data, researchers first had to create a 3D model of each tooth from CT scans. Only then were they able to employ the machine learning technique.
The teeth were so tiny that manual measurement was not an option; hence this was necessary.
Three distinct machine-learning models were trained using the measurements of tens of thousands of known dinosaur species' teeth, and the combined output of each model's output provided the most likely identification of each tooth.
According to researchers, machine learning is expected to be employed more frequently to solve future paleontology problems as long as technological advancements continue.
The study was published in the journal Papers in Palaeontology.
What Is Therizinosaur?
Therizinosaur is a large theropod. It lived 85 to 70 million years ago during the late Cretaceous period. They were found in Mongolia, according to Natural History Museum. However, the new study suggests that it also roamed on UK soil.
Therizinosaurus was featured in the recent "Jurassic World" movie. It is known for its distinctive long scissor-like claw bones.
It was a member of a class of extinct animals known as the maniraptorans, with the troodontid and well-known Velociraptor.
During the Middle Jurassic period, these dinosaurs, among the closest ancestors of contemporary birds, underwent much speciation. However, there aren't many fossils from this era, so it's hard to identify where they came from.
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