[This post is about a new paper available freely here] In 2012* with colleagues at Manchester we published a paper entitled ‘The 'Goldilocks' effect : preservation bias in vertebrate track assemblages.’ If I were to give you a simple one-liner for the paper, it would completely undermine the effort went into the paper… that if... Continue Reading →
SVP teaser/Playing with renders
I've been trying to jazz up my talk for the Society of Vertebrate Palaeontology conference in Berlin next week, and also been using the opportunity to play with Maya's rendering abilities (and also avoiding writing a lecture!). So, you might expect to see a longer, more polished version of this at my talk at SVP:... Continue Reading →
New tracks added
Very short post to announce there's a couple of tracks added to the resources section - one modern (A deer track), and one fossil (A dinosaur track from Whitby). More complete blog posts to follow soon.
Not Just Pretty Pictures…
Digitization is no longer just a novelty – it is absolutely vital to good analysis and communication of data, and it’s so easy more people should be using it. Most people reading this blog will probably know what photogrammetry is, and it’s not my aim here to discuss the method per se. Suffice to say... Continue Reading →
Uploading tracks Part 2: Dinosaur tracks now available
Well, when I say 'tracks', I really mean 'track.' I've uploaded the Tyrannosaurid track that was described by Manning, Ott, and Falkingham in 2008. This model has actually been available for a while on ResearchGate, but now it's getting uploaded and assigned a DOI. Now's as good a time as any to upload this given... Continue Reading →
Making 3D data/photographs available Part 1: Neoichnology
Those of you visiting the site may have noticed a new menu option up top there; 'Resources'. This is where I'm going to organise and make available data. For now, I'm making a selection of modern tracks available that include mammals, birds, and invertebrates. Such as this Goose footprint and metatarsus impression: Dinosaur tracks... Continue Reading →
[Academic Tech] Free software I use (2014)
Being a computery type of palaeontologist, a lot of what I do requires pretty specialist software, and ideally pretty beefy hardware. Being from Yorkshire, I begrudge paying the exceedingly large amounts of money that a lot of the professional software packages demand. But there are better reasons for my thriftiness – using freely available software... Continue Reading →
Hippo Paper out
This is kind of a duplicate of the previous post, but as the blog's still early, I'm taking the opportunity to explore post options! The Hippo paper is now assigned volume and page numbers and officially can be found here: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0031018214002193 Unofficially, it can also be found here, and here. I promise this blog eventually... Continue Reading →
Fossil Swimming Hippo TracksThis paper isn't quite out yet, but it's showing in google scholar, so I guess it's worth putting up on my [non-promoted] blog. Matthew Bennett, at the University of Bournemouth led on this one, in which we describe possible hippo swim tracks from the Koobi Fora footprint site in Kenya (site of ancient... Continue Reading →
Fossil Swimming Hippo Tracks
Historical Photogrammetry – Reconstruction of Bird’s Paluxy River Dinosaur Chase Sequence
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jWNb8QxPb4 This is probably my favorite video made by the press, describing the research my colleagues and I recently published in PLOS ONE. In 1941, Roland T. Bird excavated a large section of trackway, in which a large theropod and sauropod appeared to be moving in the same direction at about the same time. When... Continue Reading →
Prof. Peter L. Falkingham 