Ammonoid identification is crucial to biostratigraphy, systematic palaeontology, and evolutionary biology, but may prove difficult when shell features and sutures are poorly preserved. This necessitates novel approaches to ammonoid taxonomy. This study aimed to taxonomize ammonoids by their conch geometry using supervised and unsupervised machine learning algorithms. Ammonoid measurement data (conch diameter, whorl height, whorl width, and umbilical width) were taken from the Paleobiology Database (PBDB). 11 species with ≥50 specimens each were identified providing N=781 total unique specimens. Naive Bayes, Decision Tree, Random Forest, Gradient Boosting, K-Nearest Neighbours, and Support Vector Machine classifiers were applied to the PBDB data with a 5x5 nested cross-validation approach to obtain unbiased generalization performance estimates across a grid search of algorithm parameters. All supervised classifiers achieved ≥70% accuracy in identifying ammonoid species, with Naive Bayes demonstrating the least over-fitting. The unsupervised clustering algorithms K-Means, DBSCAN, OPTICS, Mean Shift, and Affinity Propagation achieved Normalized Mutual Information scores of ≥0.6, with the centroid-based methods having most success. This presents a reasonably-accurate proof-of-concept approach to ammonoid classification which may assist identification in cases where more traditional methods are not feasible.
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