Meeting Abstract

P3.82  Wednesday, Jan. 6  Taxonomic Identification of Tetrapods Using Bone Microstructure KUSTER, Stephanie; Washington University in Saint Louis stephanie.kuster@gmail.com

Taxonomic identification of fossil tetrapods has traditionally been achieved by evaluation of the presence, absence, and overall form of the gross morphology of the skeleton. New research suggests that tetrapods can also be distinguished taxonomically using quantitative measurement of a set of microstructural features found in cortical bone. Results were produced from a dataset consisting of 15 measurements taken from each of 37,000 microstructures that were distributed across 12 extant mammals. Patterns of microstructural identification within the dataset were detected using Principal Components Analysis (PCA) and confirmed to a ≤.05 confidence interval using Multiple Discriminant Analysis (MDA). Using the PCA-MDA method, 76% of the microstructures were correctly re-classified to the taxon of origin. These results are the first to quantitatively confirm a course of research that was suggested in 1849 by John Queckett of the Royal College of Surgeons London. Because the tetrapod fossil record is populated with an abundance of incomplete skeletons, this new method of taxonomic identification has far-reaching capabilities to assist in the identification of fossil specimens that would not otherwise be identifiable because of the lack of diagnostic character traits. The cosmopolitan nature of bone microstructures throughout the Tetrapoda combined with the ability to measure a sufficient number of microstructures from even a small fragment of bone makes this method a powerful identification tool that can be used to augment the established methods and increase the robusticity of the faunal data used for paleoecological reconstruction.