An international team of researchers has devised a futuristic tool to examine the footprints left by dinosaurs in our ancient past. The AI-powered app, Dinotracker, can identify dinosaur footprints in moments.

The research comes from a joint project by the Helmholtz-Zentrum research center in Berlin and the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published the paper on Monday. 

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Identifying a dinosaur species from a footprint isn't always easy. The footprint is hundreds of millions of years old, often preserved in layers of rock that have shifted over the eons since the track was laid. 

Also, we still have a lot to learn about dinosaurs, and it's not always clear which species left a footprint. Subjectivity or bias can come into play when identifying them, and scientists don't always agree with the results.

Gregor Hartmann of Helmholtz-Zentrum, who led the project, told CNET that the research team sought to remove this propensity from the identification process by developing an algorithm that could be neutral. 

"We bring a mathematical, unbiased point of view to the table to assist human experts in interpreting the data," Hartmann said. 

Researchers trained the algorithm on thousands of real fossil footprints, as well as millions of simulated versions that could recreate "natural distortions such as compression and shifting edges."

How AI is being used on dinosaur tracks

The system was trained to focus on eight major characteristics of dinosaur footprints, including the width of the toes, the position of the heel, the surface area of the foot that contacted the ground and the weight distribution across the foot. 

The AI tool uses these traits to compare new footprints to existing fossils, and then determines which dinosaur was most likely responsible for the footprint. 

The team tested it against human expert classifications and found that the AI agreed with them 90% of the time.

Hartmann made it clear that the AI system is "unsupervised." 

"We do not use any labels (like bird, theropod, ornithopod) during training. The network has no idea about it," Hartmann said. "Only after training, we compare how the network encodes the silhouettes and compare this with the human labels."

Hartmann said that the hope is for Dinotracker to be used by paleontologists and that the AI tool's data pool grows as it's used by more experts.

Bird vs. dinosaur

Using Dinotracker, the researchers have already uncovered some intriguing possibilities on the evolution of birds. When analyzing footprints more than 200 million years old, the AI found strong similarities with the foot structures of extinct and modern birds. 

The team says one possibility is that birds originated tens of millions of years earlier than we thought. But it's also possible that early dinosaur feet just look remarkably like bird feet.

This evidence, Hartmann notes, isn't enough to rethink the evolution of birds, since a skeleton is the "true evidence" of earlier bird existence.

"It is essential to keep in mind that over these millions of years, lots of different things can happen to these tracks, starting from the moisture level of the mud where it was created, over the substrate it was created on, up to erosion later," he said. "All this can heavily change the shape of the fossilized track we find, and ultimately makes it too difficult to interpret footprints, which was the motivation for our study."

Dinotracker is available for free on GitHub. It's not in a download-and-use format, so you'll have to know a bit about software to get it up and running.