To put together the difficult skeleton, David Jones and Mark Purnell, from the University of Leicester, teamed-up with Peter von Bitter from the Royal Ontario Museum, Canada, to develop computer-based methods to piece together the conodont skeleton and compare it with the success rate of palaeontologists.
David Jones commented on how the experts performed compared to the machines. “Pretty well” he said. “This is reassuring for palaeontologists but the computer-based approach did at least as well and was also consistent; experts disagreed amongst themselves, and less experienced palaeontologists, not surprisingly, made more mistakes.
“The statistical techniques therefore allow us to test and verify the conclusions drawn by palaeontologists, greatly increasing the confidence with which we can reconstruct the skeletons of extinct vertebrates. But it’s not time to retire the experts; at least not yet...”
The study is published in the latest issue of the journal Palaeontology.
Found in rocks
Meet a Role Model who studies geology.
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Date Published: November 17, 2009
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