Sauropod teeth dental microwear texture analysis (DMTA)(free pdf)
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Ben Creisler
Apr 8, 2026, 10:57:46 AMApr 8
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Ben Creisler
A new paper:
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Free pdf:
André Saleiro, Emanuel Tschopp, Alexander Daasch, Thomas M. Kaiser, Ria Wiesinger & Daniela E. Winkler (2026)
Acquisition of and quality assessment in a dataset for dental microwear texture analysis (DMTA) of sauropod teeth
Historical Biology (advance online publication)
doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/08912963.2026.2627437
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08912963.2026.2627437
Free pdf:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/08912963.2026.2627437
Dental microwear texture analysis (DMTA) has been widely used to study the dietary habits and trends of animals, based on the abrasion patterns preserved in dental enamel. Therefore, it is an important tool to understand the ecology, niche partitioning, and competition between co-occurring extant and extinct taxa. Late Jurassic sauropod dinosaur faunas were quite diverse, with distinct groups inhabiting the same ecosystems. Being the largest mega-herbivores of their ecosystems, competition for resources could have been a determining factor behind such diversity, making sauropods a good study-group for DMTA. Here, we describe the complete process of creating a large DMTA dataset of 119 teeth attributed to most major Late Jurassic sauropod groups. We describe in detail the production of dental moulds, casts, and the steps taken throughout the measuring process of the three-dimensional surface textures. We also describe the way in which we tested the quality of our data, as well as the taphonomical implications for future studies using the resulting dataset. Our tests confirm the lack of a taphonomic impact on the acquired data and the comparability of measurements obtained from both moulds and original teeth. The result is the first large DMTA sauropod teeth dataset, consisting of 971 measurements.
André Saleiro, Emanuel Tschopp, Alexander Daasch, Thomas M. Kaiser, Ria Wiesinger & Daniela E. Winkler (2026)
Acquisition of and quality assessment in a dataset for dental microwear texture analysis (DMTA) of sauropod teeth
Historical Biology (advance online publication)
doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/08912963.2026.2627437
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08912963.2026.2627437
Free pdf:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/08912963.2026.2627437
Dental microwear texture analysis (DMTA) has been widely used to study the dietary habits and trends of animals, based on the abrasion patterns preserved in dental enamel. Therefore, it is an important tool to understand the ecology, niche partitioning, and competition between co-occurring extant and extinct taxa. Late Jurassic sauropod dinosaur faunas were quite diverse, with distinct groups inhabiting the same ecosystems. Being the largest mega-herbivores of their ecosystems, competition for resources could have been a determining factor behind such diversity, making sauropods a good study-group for DMTA. Here, we describe the complete process of creating a large DMTA dataset of 119 teeth attributed to most major Late Jurassic sauropod groups. We describe in detail the production of dental moulds, casts, and the steps taken throughout the measuring process of the three-dimensional surface textures. We also describe the way in which we tested the quality of our data, as well as the taphonomical implications for future studies using the resulting dataset. Our tests confirm the lack of a taphonomic impact on the acquired data and the comparability of measurements obtained from both moulds and original teeth. The result is the first large DMTA sauropod teeth dataset, consisting of 971 measurements.
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