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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
Dr Peter L. Falkingham 