Pampush et al. molaR project Project ID: 00000C192 Public

43 Media · 15 Specimens · Managed by: James Pampush

Researchers studying mammalian dentitions from a functional perspective have increasingly moved towards using dental topography measures that can be estimated from 3D surface scans, which do not require identification of specific homologous landmarks. Here we present molaR, a new R package designed to assist researchers in calculating four commonly used topographic measures DNE (Dirichlet Normal Energy), RFI (Relief Index), OPC (Orientation Patch Count) and OPCR (Orientation Patch Count Rotated) from surface scans of teeth, enabling a unified application of these informative new metrics. In addition to providing topographic measuring tools, molaR has complimentary plotting functions enabling highly customizable visualization of results. This article walks researchers through installing, operating, and trouble-shooting molaR and its functions and gives an example of a simple comparison that measured teeth of the primates Alouatta and Pithecia, in molaR and other available software packages. molaR is a free and open source software extension, which can be found in the supplementary materials as well as on the Internet repository CRAN, which stores R packages.