Dental molds from: Three-dimensional dental topography and feeding ecology in the extinct cave bear

A dual-phase technique was used to produce polyvinylsiloxane-based molds (Virtual Putty and Light Body compounds) from original tooth rows (P4-M2). High-resolution replicas were obtained from molds using non-reflective polyurethane (Feroca Composites, Spain). Dental replicas were scanned at 0.2 mm resolution with a Roland LPX-600 located at the Central Research Services (University of Málaga, Spain). Meshes were merged and processed in Geomagic Studio 2012 (Geomagic, Inc. USA) to obtain entire enamel caps (EEC) of each tooth row cropped at cervical margin, smoothed and downsampled to 10,000 polygons faces. The EEC method was used here to prevent planometric footprint area lost and produce metric values for whole tooth shape. Meshes (*.ply file format) were then aligned orthogonal to the occlusal surfaces using MeshLab to mitigate impact of topographic metrics.