In this article, I will tell you about the 168 Million Years Ago, Dinosaurs: Mysterious ancient teeth found in three English counties are believed to belong to a dinosaur with scissor-like claws which roamed Britain 168 million years ago.
Paleontologists said the fossils unearthed in Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire and Dorset were the first ever examples of therizinosaur and troodontid dinosaurs on UK soil.
Not only that, but the remains are the world’s oldest-known evidence of those species and could represent some of the earliest relatives of birds ever discovered.
Therizinosaurus – which featured in the most recent Jurassic World film – was a large herbivore dinosaur from the late Cretaceous known for its distinctive long scissor-like claw bones.
Along with the troodontid and well-known Velociraptor, it belonged to a group of ancient creatures called the maniraptorans.
These dinosaurs, which are known to be among the closest relatives to modern birds, evolved into numerous species during the Middle Jurassic period.
WHAT WAS THERIZINOSAURUS?
Also known as the ‘scythe lizard’, therizinosaurs lived in Asia during the Late Cretaceous period around 70 million years ago.
It was a large dinosaur that is only known from its forelimb skeleton, so reconstructions are mostly guesswork.
Little is known about the species’ diet, but it was primarily found in Mongolia.
New fossil evidence also suggests it lived in what is now Britain, too.
However, because fossils during this time are scarce, knowledge of their origins are scarce.
The mysterious teeth – some of which were found as far back as the 1970s and others more recently – were identified with the help of pioneering machine-learning techniques carried out by researchers from the Natural History Museum and Birkbeck College.
‘Previous research had suggested that the maniraptorans were around in the Middle Jurassic, but the actual fossil evidence was patchy and disputed,’ said lead researcher Simon Wills, a Ph.D. student at the Natural History Museum.
‘Along with fossils found elsewhere, this research suggests the group had already achieved global distribution by this time.
‘The teeth we analyzed include what are currently the only troodontid and therizinosaur fossils ever recorded from the UK and are the oldest evidence of these dinosaurs anywhere in the world.’
While previous studies have attempted to classify isolated teeth based on a variety of statistical methods, they’ve not always been particularly successful.
That is why the experts behind the new research have been working to improve machine learning tools like the one they used.
‘The use of machine learning in vertebrate paleontology is still in its infancy, although its usage is growing’ Wills said.
‘The main drawback is the need to have a comprehensive training dataset for the models to learn from.
‘In our study, we are fortunate that there is already a relatively large dataset of dinosaur tooth measurements available that we could use to train the models.’
To be able to use the machine learning technique, researchers had to first produce a 3D model of each tooth from CT scanning so that the AI could interpret the fossil information.
This had to be done because the teeth were so small that taking measurements by hand was impractical.
The measurements of thousands of teeth from known dinosaur species were then used to train three different machine learning models, with the results of each combined to give the most likely identity of each tooth.
Researchers said that with continued technological innovations, it is likely that machine learning will become more commonly used to help answer more paleontology mysteries.
source: dailymail.com
