I've been struggling to find the time to get blog posts out recently. Luckily, I have a morning to do just that! Sauropod tracks First up, we have 'Digit-only sauropod pes trackways from China – evidence of swimming or a preservational phenomenon?' by Lida Xing and a number of colleagues including myself, published in Nature Scientific... Continue Reading →
New Paper: Sivatherium, a big, extinct, giraffid
New paper out today in Biology Letters led by Chris Basu and with John Hutchinson, both from the Royal Vet College. Sivatherium is an extinct Giraffid from the Plio-Pleistocene boundary (~2.5 million years ago), found near the foothills of what is today (and indeed basically was then…) the Himalayas. It’s an interesting beasty that has... Continue Reading →
Cambrian Echinoderm Computational Fluid Dynamics
New paper in Proc B on Cambrian Echinoderm Hydrodynamics
A visit to Denmark and Digitized Crocodile tracks
Last month I was fortunate to head over to Denmark and visit my friend and colleague Jesper Milàn at Geomuseum Faxe. We’ve worked together in the recent past (we have a chapter together in the forthcoming Dinosaur Tracks: Next Steps) but aside from a few conferences, we’ve never actually sat down in the same room to... Continue Reading →
Sharing vs Presenting digital data -or- Please don’t use 3D PDFs; just upload obj/ply
This post is as much about initiating discussion as it is about my own thoughts on the matter, so feel free to comment away, here, or twitter, or google+ or wherever – I’m interested in thoughts and perspectives. So… 3D PDFs. They seem like a really good idea right? You can encapsulate 3D information to... Continue Reading →
Ugh!… Being useful? This is not what I signed up for!
As a palaeontologist, sometimes it can be difficult to justify what you do to the people down the local pub. From personal experience, I’ve learnt that when surrounded by a teacher, plumber, mechanic and farmer, announcing that the EU just gave you a substantial pot of money to look at 200 million year old dinosaur... Continue Reading →
The Historical Photogrammetry Challenge – over to you!
In 2014, colleagues and I published a photogrammetric reconstruction of the Paluxy River dinosaur ‘chase sequence,’ as generated from photographs taken before and during its excavation in 1940. (Blog post here). Photogrammetry has become pretty common now; commercial and open source programs are widely being used by all kinds of people, including palaeontologists, and there are... Continue Reading →
Weighing Dinosaurs (and other animals) with Meshlab
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 love it when a plan comes together
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 →
The birth of a dinosaur footprint
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 →
