By Nicola Davis
Publication Date: 2026-01-26 20:00:00
Experts have developed an app that uses artificial intelligence to identify dinosaurs based on the footprints they left behind after they stalked the land millions of years ago.
“When we find a dinosaur footprint, we try to do like Cinderella and find the foot that fits the slipper,” said Prof. Steve Brusatte, co-author of the paper from the University of Edinburgh. “But it’s not that simple, because the shape of a dinosaur footprint depends not only on the shape of the dinosaur’s foot, but also on the type of sand or mud it walked through and the movement of its foot.”
Brusatte and colleagues report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences how previous AI systems based their learning on footprints that had already been determined to come from certain species of dinosaurs. However, if these identifications are incorrect, the team indicates that the AI system is also flawed.
“You never find a footprint and the dinosaur next to it…