Experimenting on applying machine vision to Dinosaur Footprints with Mark Baggott from the Herefordshire and Worcestershire Earth Heritage Trust. These are some of the photographs of Dinosaur footprints and tracks Mark and his colleagues have taken recently from a variety of UK locations.
As a hobby, it’s still early days, seeing if we can create a predictive machine vision model you can run on your smartphone when beachcombing, just as a bit of fun for outreach, to help spark interest in combining both geology and artificial intelligence. If you are interested in earth sciences and computer sciences – you can do both!
In the UK, Compton Bay in the Isle of Wight is one of the best places to see dinosaur footprint casts. Back in the Cretaceous period (~120 Million years ago) this may have been a dinosaur migration route along the banks of a muddy river. The footprint depressions were filled in with silt and preserved. At that time, the UK would have been roughly where North Africa is today, part of a large river valley system in a subtropical climate.
In this location large (sometimes as large as 1 meter – 3 feet wide) 3 toed footprints commonly seen are attributed to Iguanodon, a herbivore (plant eating) dinosaur. Carnivorous (meat eating) theropod dinosaur footprints are rarer, smaller with more pointed toes.
The giant sauropods tend to leave a rounded pod, often only part of the foot leaves a print so a half or quarter moon shape is also possible – so trackways can really help detection. The best specimens I have seen are in Asturias in Northern Spain along with Therapods.
For interest, Iguanodon was one of the statues in the world’s first dinosaur statue park, created in 1853 at Crystal Palace in London. At the time they thought Iguanodon had a horn which is present on the statue, but it later turned out this was more likely to be a thumb spike it used for defence!
I have also included some links to the Natural History Museum in London describing dinosaur footprints, and the recent track site discovered in Oxfordshire, which is the largest ever found in the UK.
Mark runs a charity which includes a project delivering fossil boxes to educational establishments across the UK and as well as the standard box there is also an SEN box, and a braille version of the box will be launched shortly. Contact Mark at m.baggott@worc.ac.uk if you’d like to find out more. If you have ideas for outreach, how we may interest more young people in earth science and computer science, please feel free to reach out to me if you think I can help.
Attribution to Trevor Watts for the footprint chart.
