Palaeontologist: Dinosaur Footprints – Biomechanics – Simulation
A couple of years ago, I was part of a group that published a method on calculating body mass in extinct animals from laser scans of their skeletons. The method involves separating the model into parts, and then using the qhull command to produce a volume that encloses the segment as tightly as possible. This... Continue Reading →
I was clearing out some papers from my desk draw, and came across this: This is an initial idea Steve and I sketched, one day in mid 2012, of how we thought some of the Amherst tracks were being formed. Ultimately, those first discussions lead to this figure in our recent paper: It's nice to see... Continue Reading →
Monday saw the release of a paper that Steve Gatesy and I have been brewing up for the past couple of years. The paper is published in PNAS, and is titled: The birth of a dinosaur footprint: Subsurface 3D motion reconstruction and discrete element simulation reveal track ontogeny. It's a bit of a long title,... Continue Reading →
[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 →
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 →
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.
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
Prof. Peter L. Falkingham 