Palaeontologist: Dinosaur Footprints – Biomechanics – Simulation
I should probably have made this post sooner, as it's about my chapter in the Great Dinosaur Track Book Of 2016: "Dinosaur Tracks: The Next Steps". It's a volume I was privileged enough to be an editor for, and it contains a number of excellent chapters. I wanted to post about my own... Continue Reading →
Last week saw the publication of a new paper by me and my colleague Angela Horner concerning the production of traces by terrestrially locomoting lungfish. Lungfish, as their name suggests, are perfectly capable of breathing air. When the body of water they are living in dries up, they are able to move over land to find... Continue Reading →
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 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 →
New paper in Proc B on Cambrian Echinoderm Hydrodynamics
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
