AUTOMATED MULTI-VIEW SILHOUETTE GENERATION AND MORPHOMETRIC CLUSTERING OF ISOLATED THEROPOD TEETH USING MACHINE LEARNING

Isolated theropod teeth are abundant in mesozoic vertebrate assemblages and often taxonomically informative, but their description still relies on manual measurements and expert-defined characters. We present an automated computer-vision workflow that converts raw multi-view photographs of isolated theropod teeth into standardized binary silhouettes in labial, lingual, mesial, distal, and basal cross-sectional views. A segmentation model initialized from dinosaur-track image binarization was used and then finetuned on tooth-like shapes. The model was applied to 74 theropod teeth (10 for testing) from Guimarota, a Late Jurassic locality in Portugal, containing one of the most important assemblages of isolated small theropod teeth in Europe. From the silhouettes, we extracted width, height, and contour-angle descriptors from whole crown and upper, middle, and lower crown regions. Dimensionality reduction and density-based clustering (HDBSCAN) were used to explore the measurement space, and cluster assignments were interpreted with random forest feature importance and decision trees. The analysis used 64 independent teeth represented by 1280 derived view-region records; the most influential variables included height and width measurements. HDBSCAN identified five clusters and eleven unassigned specimens, suggesting morphological heterogeneity. Cluster-assigned silhouettes were then used to train an EfficientNet model on 53 assigned teeth. As an exploratory internal-consistency check, the model recovered cluster-derived classes with high mean performance under repeated stratified cross-validation, although with some fold-to-fold variation, especially in the least represented cluster. Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM) highlighted anatomically meaningful silhouette regions, including apices, lateral contours, basal margins, and cross-sectional perimeter. This workflow provides a scalable framework for reproducible theropod tooth morphometrics.