Discovering Dinosaur Footprints

This project was conducted jointly between Liverpool John Moore University, Brown University and the EPCC. Researchers wanted to create a simulation of how large, bipedal dinosaurs such as the Tyrannosaurus Rex walked, which can only be partially modelled using fossils and footprints. To do this, this, XROMM software was used within ARCHER to analyse the movement patterns of a guinea fowl, the closest living relative of the T. Rex, walking through poppy seeds. LIGGGHTS software was then used to simulate how the poppy seeds moved as the guinea fowl walked through them. This created a real-time model of how the T.Rex and similar dinosaurs may have walked. The significance of this research is that we can now re-create the movements of other extinct animals and gain further insight into how modern animals have evolved and why.

This project would have been impossible without ARCHER or similar HPC services because of the complexity in simulating both dinosaur and sediment movement.

Falkingham, P.L. and Gatesy, S.M., 2014.The birth of a dinosaur footprint: subsurface 3D motion reconstruction and discrete element simulation reveal track ontogeny. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(51), pp.18279-18284.

Gatesy, S.M. and Falkingham, P.L., 2017. Neither bones nor feet: track morphological variation and ‘preservation quality’. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 37(3)

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