It's a while since I've posted about new papers, so I'm going to have a series of posts catching up on 2022's papers. First up is Jens Lallensack's cool paper in Interface about using AI and machine learning to distinguish between theropod and ornithopod tracks. For those unfamiliar, ornithopod tracks and theropod tracks are both... Continue Reading →
New paper: Constructing and testing hypotheses of dinosaur foot motion
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 →