What do you get when you cross Carcharodontosaurus with Majungatholus? Good luck telling the two apart. Owing to paltry numbers of whole specimens that fail to illuminate a range of intraspecies morphological variation, dinosaur classification can be a task as gargantuan as some of its famed species. But Josh Smith, Ph.D., assistant professor of earth and planetary sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has concocted a mathematical scheme for identifying dinosaurs based upon measurements of their copious Mesozoic dental droppings. His method could help paleobiologists identify and reconstruct the lives of the creatures that roamed our terra firma many millions of years ago. Smith, who claims he's "not very good at math," and his coauthors, David R. Vann and Peter Dodson of the University of Pennsylvania, devised a quantitative methodology by which an isolated tooth of a predatory dinosaur — a theropod — can be correlated with a given genus. They used a variety of measurements — some of which had been defined by previous workers — that describe the basic size and general shape of the teeth as well as devised functions that help quantitatively describe the shapes of the curved surfaces possessed by the teeth. The result was a preliminary but rigorous method of classifying theropod teeth with established genera. Smith and his colleagues published their in work in a recent issue of The Anatomical Record (Vol. 285, 2005). "My whole point was to take an isolated tooth and figure out what dinosaur it belonged to," Smith explained. "The questions I'm interested in are different than 'what did this thing eat?' I'm interested more in teeth as tools for dinosaur identification rather than the teeth as teeth themselves." Teeth as hardy identifiers
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