The acquisition of dental DEMs with confocal microscopy offers several advantages over traditional specimen photographs. The most immediate benefit is the ability to visualize the morphology of small teeth or other small fossils. The DEMs also represent a permanent record of tooth morphology that can be stored and made available to the scientific community. Indeed, DEM representations of valuable museum collections could decrease the need to handle original specimens and thus lessen the risks of damage to specimens. Also, the confocal scanning method is well-suited for large sample sizes and facilitates detailed studies on variation within and among species in stratigraphically long sequences. The use of DEMs acquired with confocal microscopes in GIS (or perhaps more appropriately, Morphological Information Systems on Teeth, MIST) software allows new kinds of analyses to be undertaken that are less dependent on landmarks. Furthermore, use of dental DEMs and GIS for exploratory research could be useful in teaching as well as morphological research.
The most obvious limitations of DEMs is that they can be used to represent shapes that consist of one height value (z-value) for a given x-y pair. For example, tooth roots cannot be included within the same DEM as the crown. Similarly, some dental shapes are too convoluted for occlusal DEM representation (e.g., crabeater seal, Lobodon carcinophagus postcanines). One limitation with laser confocal microscopes is that they are designed for the study of very small specimens. For example, the confocal microscope available to us is only practical for teeth smaller than 10 mm when large sample sizes are required. Thus, the acquisition of DEMs from larger teeth require other techniques (e.g., Reed 1997, Zuccotti et al. 1998). However, the high-resolutions available with confocal laser microscopes makes possible the study even the smallest teeth in great detail. Obviously, in addition to small teeth, small features, such as microwear DEMs, also could be acquired with laser confocal microscopes (Boyde and Fortelius 1991).