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 →
A day out looking for footprints with the BBC
You can listen to the programme here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3cswvxr A few months ago, I was contacted about a program on the BBC world service - CrowdScience. I was asked a few things about what I work on, and answered some questions about what we can learn from dinosaur tracks. The idea for the show is that... Continue Reading →
The importance of 3D for tracks -or- how big is your footprint really!
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 →
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 →
Stop being so picky, Goldilocks
[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 →
Uploading tracks Part 2: Dinosaur tracks now available
Well, when I say 'tracks', I really mean 'track.' I've uploaded the Tyrannosaurid track that was described by Manning, Ott, and Falkingham in 2008. This model has actually been available for a while on ResearchGate, but now it's getting uploaded and assigned a DOI. Now's as good a time as any to upload this given... Continue Reading →
Historical Photogrammetry – Reconstruction of Bird’s Paluxy River Dinosaur Chase Sequence
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jWNb8QxPb4 This is probably my favorite video made by the press, describing the research my colleagues and I recently published in PLOS ONE. In 1941, Roland T. Bird excavated a large section of trackway, in which a large theropod and sauropod appeared to be moving in the same direction at about the same time. When... Continue Reading →