Palaeobiology, locomotion & fossil footprints — using 3D imaging, AI, and robotics
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 →
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 →
