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Dryad

CT slices of three Protoceratopsian skulls and example slices of other Gobi Desert vertebrates

Cite this dataset

Yu, Congyu et al. (2022). CT slices of three Protoceratopsian skulls and example slices of other Gobi Desert vertebrates [Dataset]. Dryad. https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.k6djh9w7w

Abstract

This is a image dataset for deep learning studies. The main dataset comprises labeled CT slices from 3 protoceratopsian dinosaur skulls discovered from the Gobi Desert, Mongolia. The fossil specimens are now in the Division of Paleontology, American Museum of Natural History, New York, NY, USA. Inside the folders named after specimen number (i.e. IGM100-1021), there are six sub-folders comprising labeled or unlabled CT slice images of the specimen from three directions: axial, coronal, and sagittal. Each direction should contain all the information to reconstruct the entire specimen.

The other folder named Gobi Vert comprise CT slices, but not enough to reconstruct the original specimens, of multiple vertebrate fossils also discovered from the Gobi Desert, Mongolia. The specimen number and taxa are noted in the image names.

Methods

The CT scans were done in either the Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences, Yale University, USA or the American Museum of Natural History. The segmentation was done by authors, then labelled images are exported as the groundtruth for deep learning training. The detail of the dataset is following:

Specimen number

Taxa

Dimension

Voxel size (μm)

Selected slices (training+testing)

IGM 100/3654

Protoceratops

1228*1902*1042

21.43

2059+885

IGM 100/3655

Protoceratops

1362*1731*1193

21.44

3047+1239

IGM 100/1021

Protoceratopsia

768*1784*1533

22.74

2880+1205

However, users are free to divide training, testing, and validating dataset as they need. 

Usage notes

The dataset comprises three rarely preserved embryonic protoceratopsian dinosaurs skulls, thus the morphological information embedded are also important for paleontological studies. The slices included here are enough to reconstruct the entire morphology of these embryonic skulls, therefore, if anyone would like to study the morphology of these fossils, please ask the consent from the correspondence author Congyu Yu cyu@amnh.org.