Acquisition of and quality assessment in a dataset for dental microwear texture analysis (DMTA) of sauropod teeth

Dental microwear texture analysis (DMTA) has been widely used in the study of dietary habits and trends of animals, based on the abrasion patterns preserved in dental enamel. Therefore, it is seen as an important tool when it comes to understanding the ecology, niche partitioning, and competition between co-occurring taxa, both extant and extinct. During the Late Jurassic, sauropod dinosaur faunas were quite diverse, with distinct groups inhabiting the same ecosystems. Being the largest mega-herbivores of their ecosystems, competition for resources could have been a determining factor that led to such diversity, making sauropods a good study-group for DMTA. Here we describe the complete process of creating a large DMTA dataset of 119 teeth attributed to most major sauropod groups from the Late Jurassic. We describe in detail the production of dental molds, casts, and the steps taken throughout the measuring process of the three-dimensional surface textures. We also describe the way in which we tested the quality of our data, as well as the taphonomical implications for future studies using the resulting dataset. The end result is the first large DMTA sauropod teeth dataset, consisting of 971 measurements.