DinoTracker: New AI App Matches Footprints to Prehistoric Giants

A team of international researchers launched DinoTracker, a free mobile app that uses artificial intelligence to identify dinosaur species from their fossilized footprints. Developed by experts from the University of Edinburgh and the Helmholtz-Zentrum in Germany, the app allows citizen scientists and paleontologists alike to upload photos or silhouettes of tracks found in the wild. The AI then analyzes the shape, evaluating eight key features like toe spread and heel position, to provide a classification that matches human expert analysis 90% of the time.

Unlike previous AI attempts that relied on potentially biased human labels, this system was trained on 2,000 unlabelled silhouettes, allowing the machine to discover its own meaningful patterns. One of the app’s most striking early findings supports the theory that some Triassic footprints are remarkably bird-like, appearing tens of millions of years before the first known bird skeletons. While some scientists caution that these tracks might simply be bird-like dinosaurs rather than true birds, the tool provides a rigorous new way to test deep-time evolutionary theories.

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The app is now available for download, turning every hiker with a smartphone into a potential field researcher. Users can also manipulate footprint silhouettes within the app to see how environmental factors, like mud consistency, might have altered a dinosaur’s “step.” By crowdsourcing data, the team hopes to build the world’s most comprehensive digital map of prehistoric movement, bridging the gap between professional science and public exploration.

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