Meeting Abstract
Increases in the availability and affordability of 3D model generation have led to the rapid development of methods that evaluate the morphology of extinct and extant animals. In particular, orientation patch count rotated, a technique that quantifies phenotypic tooth morphology, allows for the direct comparison of dental elements without homologous landmarks. This method has been particularly useful in the ecological reconstructions of extinct taxa. Given the fast pace of technological development, the program that initially developed the method, Surfer Manipulator, is often not used in subsequent studies, replaced by more intuitive, flexible, or freely available programs. Unfortunately, the repeatability of these methods is neglected due to a combination of factors including dissimilar datasets or unavailability of programs. Here, we use a single dataset of saurian teeth to directly test the compatibility of three orientation patch count rotated methods: Surfer Manipulator, the R-package ‘molaR’, and MorphoTester. We find that the freely available programs, MorphoTester and molaR, consistently produce identical dental complexities, an expected observation as these programs calculate dental complexity in the same fashion. In contrast, these programs do not replicate the measurements generated from Surfer Manipulator, frequently producing higher average dental complexity values. In particular, dentitions belonging to carnivores are especially susceptible to this disparity. We strongly recommend that datasets created from combinations of these methods should not be used, especially for ecological reconstructions. These results emphasize the importance of replicating previous studies with the advent of novel methods. Additionally, in the case of orientation patch count rotated, care needs to be taken when deciding what method to apply to one’s dataset.
