Madrid, 15 (Europe Press)
In an international collaboration, University of Queensland paleontologist Dr Anthony Romelio has used AI pattern recognition to re-analyze footprints at Dinosaur Stampede National Monument, southwest of Winton in central Queensland, Australia.
Discovered half a century ago, it’s the world’s only known record site of a dinosaur stampede, with fossilized tracks that have been interpreted as a predator – the Australopithecus, with legs nearly two meters long – that lurked and caused the stampede of some 150 two-legged dinosaurs.
“The mysterious tracks are believed to have been left during the middle of the Cretaceous period, about 93 million years ago. But determining exactly what kind of dinosaur made the tracks, especially tens of millions of years ago, can be very difficult and confusing. It’s a very difficult and confusing business.” Since the large footprints are These are surrounded by thousands of small dinosaur footprints, which led many to believe that this predatory beast could cause smaller dinosaurs to stampede, so to solve this issue, we decided to use intelligence software. Deep is called Convolutional Neural Networks,” he explained in a statement.
He was trained on 1,500 dinosaur footprints, all from a theropod or ornithopod, dinosaur groups related to the tracks at Dinosaur National Monument.
The results were clear: the tracks were drawn by a herbivorous ornithopod.
Computer assistance was vital, as the team was originally at a standstill, said Dr Jens Lalensac, lead author from Liverpool John Moores University in the UK.
“We were pretty much stuck, so thank God for modern technology. In our three-person research team, one person was in favor of carnivores, one person was reluctant, and one person was in favor of plant-eaters. So, to really check our knowledge, we decided Going to five experts to illustrate, and also using AI. AI was the clear winner, outperforming all the experts by a huge margin, with a margin of error of about 11 percent. When we used AI on large footprints at Dinosaur Stampede National Monument, All but one of these footprints are classified as being left by an ornithopod dinosaur, the “prehistoric ‘predator'”.
The team hopes to continue adding to the dinosaur fossil footprint database and conducting more AI research.
The research is published in the journal The Royal Society Interface and involves a collaboration between Australian, German and British researchers.
A replica of the Dinosaur Trail is on display at the Queensland Museum, Brisbane, and the trail site can be visited near southwest Winton, Queensland.
