Identifying dinosaurs by their footprints is difficult – but AI can help

When you hear the word “dinosaur,” the first thing that might come to mind is a giant skeleton like Sue T Rex in Chicago’s Field Museum or Sophie the Stegosaurus at the Natural History Museum in London. Dinosaur skeletons give us powerful evidence of what these ancient animals looked like, from the plates and spines of stegosaurs like Sophie to the long-necked, airplane-sized bodies of titanosaurs.

However, despite their iconic status as museum decorations, skeletons are not the most common type of dinosaur fossil known. The prize goes to dinosaur footprints.

The abundance of dinosaur footprints is intuitive. Each dinosaur could only leave one skeleton behind – but every single day of its life it could leave thousands of footprints. So even if only a tiny fraction were fossilized, we could expect to find many more of them in the fossil record.

Dinosaur footprints are created in environments where the ground is soft enough to leave an impression, but still coherent…