Palaeobiology, locomotion & fossil footprints — using 3D imaging, AI, and robotics
I have a folder of CT data from 2013 that I haven't looked at in years. Something has nagged at it for most of those years: a guineafowl's right leg bone measured differently in two scans of the same animal. This week I pointed Claude Code (Opus 5.5) at the folder and let it dig.... Continue Reading →
Three papers in the last few months, which feels like a decent enough excuse to do a quick roundup. Micro-CT scanning tracks (Tash Prescott et al.) First up is Tash Prescott with a paper just out in Fossil Studies: How do you visualise what's happening beneath the surface when a foot presses into sediment, without destroying... Continue Reading →
Well, we start 2025 off with a new paper in Biology Letters reviewing dinosaur locomotion. This is part of the 200 years of dinosaurs special collection, containing a bunch of reviews on different areas. The paper is available fully open access here: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbl.2024.0441 As an added bonus, I was asked to do an online seminar... Continue Reading →
In this post, I want to tell you about a paper that I co-authored with Kevin Hatala and Stephen Gatesy, which was published in Nature Ecology & Evolution. It’s called “Arched footprints preserve the motions of fossil hominin feet” and it’s about how we can use fossil footprints to learn about the way our ancient... Continue Reading →
It's a while since I've posted about new papers, so I'm going to have a series of posts catching up on 2022's papers. First up is Jens Lallensack's cool paper in Interface about using AI and machine learning to distinguish between theropod and ornithopod tracks. For those unfamiliar, ornithopod tracks and theropod tracks are both... Continue Reading →
Today sees the online (in press) publication of work I've been showing off since early in my Marie Curie Post-doc, way back in 2012! Falkingham, P.L., Turner, M.L. and Gatesy, S.M. (2020), Constructing and testing hypotheses of dinosaur foot motions from fossil tracks using digitization and simulation. Palaeontology. doi:10.1111/pala.12502 The paper's open access, so click... Continue Reading →
The LJMU Scholarship scheme has opened once again. PhD's on offer: Biomechanical function of the metatarsals in digitigrade animals.Using computer generated social stimuli to examine the behavioural, hormonal, and neural responses to agonistic signals in a highly social fishMolecular and 3D morphological analysis of fossilised parasitesParticle Physics for Manufacturing Unlike previous years where students applied... Continue Reading →
I was involved in some fun research that was finally published last year, and I didn’t have chance to write blog posts for all of it, so here’s a summary of what came out of the Falkingham lab last year: The year started off with a paper led by collaborators at Brown. My simulation work... Continue Reading →
New paper out today in Royal Society Interface, that I’m rather excited to be a co-author on. Led by Dr Kristen Crandell from Bangor University, and with her former undergrad Rowan Howe (I believe it start out as his undergrad project), the paper takes a look at how beak shape across kingfishers correlates with lifestyle.... Continue Reading →
A couple of weeks ago I was out walking in North Wales near Conwy, and came across this: Intriguing! This was on the top of the hill near Conwy, and there were no animals immediately visible. But it did get my mind thinking about apparent swimming dinosaur tracks I’d seen figured before: I’ve... Continue Reading →
