New Paper: “Quantifying the Denticle Multiverse” by Rubin et al 2025 is out!

A huge congratulations to Leah Rubin, PaleoFISHES Visiting PhD student and all of Team Denticles for the publication of a paper that has been “in the works” since, well, 2014 (and really since ~2017). The paper, “Quantifying the Denticle Multiverse: A Standardized Coding System to Capture Three Dimensional Morphological Variations for Quantitative Evolutionary and Ecological Studies of Elasmobranch Denticles” presents a universal character coding scheme to capture denticle morphological diversity. The coding scheme is not dependent on imaging type, and can be used by researchers in all fields – from paleontology to functional morphology to developmental biology to bio-inspired design. The paper is fully opens source, and it comes with a fully developed R package to carry out analyses.

Read an interview with lead author Leah Rubin here: https://iobopen.com/2025/11/21/every-research-experience-is-a-data-point-spotlight-on-iob-co-author-leah-rubin/

Read the full paper here: https://academic.oup.com/iob/article/7/1/obaf021/8129726

Download the R package: https://github.com/esibert/ichthyoliths

Full paper citation: L D Rubin, G J Fraser, M K Gabler-Smith, G V Lauder, W V Ribeiro, D F B Vaz, N Wallis-Mauro, E C Sibert, Quantifying the Denticle Multiverse: A Standardized Coding System to Capture Three Dimensional Morphological Variations for Quantitative Evolutionary and Ecological Studies of Elasmobranch Denticles, Integrative Organismal Biology, Volume 7, Issue 1, 2025, obaf021, https://doi.org/10.1093/iob/obaf021