MicroWeaR: A new R package for dental microwear analysis.

ABSTRACT: Mastication of dietary items with different mechanical properties leaves distinctive microscopic marks on the surface of tooth enamel. The inspection of such marks (dental microwear analysis) is informative about the dietary habitus in fossil as well as in modern species. Dental microwear analysis relies on the morphology, abundance, direction, and distribution of these microscopic marks. We present a new freely available software implementation, MicroWeaR, that, compared to traditional dental microwear tools, allows more rapid, observer error free, and inexpensive quantification and classification of all the microscopic marks (also including for the first time different subtypes of scars). Classification parameters and graphical rendering of the output are fully settable by the use

SUBMITTER: Strani F 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6065344 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature