my paleo research

hey ! i wanted to share the research i did over the summer at the university of alberta :] i was accepted into a summer research program where I was placed in the dino lab. i had a lot of fun working there and my research turned out to be statistically significant proving that my method of teeth identification is accurate and can and should be used in larger studies!

PROBLEM: there is a big issue in palaeontology (the study of ancient life) where we will find dinosaur teeth but have no way of identifying what kind of dinosaur that tooth came from! my project solved this issue.

THIS STUDY: in my study i wanted to focus on just 3 kinds of dinosaur.s 1) because this program is only 6 weeks long and 2) because the u of a doesn't have large sample sizes of other kinds of dinosaur. i worked on ceratopsians (like triceratops with the horns and the frill), pachycephalosaurians (dome-headed dinosaurs), and ankylosaurs (armour-backed dinosaurs)!

METHODS: i got to go into a very dingy basement of the university where they store the fossils and i took pictures of hundreds of teeth which i then uploaded to my computer. i used a program to measure different parts of each tooth (ex: crown length, base crown width, mid-crown width, ect). i then uploaded my data to another program which could create graphs from my measurements and attempt to identify the teeth. the entire goal of this project is to collect a lot of measurements of different kinds of teeth, so that when the computer is given a tooth that isn't identified yet, the computer can identify it for us!

RESULTS: 100% of the time the computer was able to identify ceratopsids teeth, 75% of the time for the ankylosaurids, and 71% of the time for the pachycephalosaurids!

CONCLUSIONS: because the computer was able to identify this teeth with an overall average of 88%, this means my method of microsite identification is valid! there are many other cool things we can learn from the results of my study and if you want to check them out you can read the poster i made :]

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1I2PqWNmYgPlUK5FKqtsfLZInjQ0FgeaD/view?usp=sharing