Senior Lecturer in Vertebrate Biology
Office: James Parsons Building, Byrom Street, Liverpool, L3 3AF
+44 015 123 2140
P.L.Falkingham@ljmu.ac.uk
Research Interests
My research focus is on animal motion, and how such motion is preserved in the fossil record.
My primary research incorporates data from extant taxa and high performance computer simulations. This can then be tied to understanding footprint formation, and ultimately how extinct animals moved.
In addition to my work on locomotion and footprints, I’m also involved in other research areas including biomechanics, computational fluid dynamics, and development of digitisation and motion capture techniques and applications.
https://www.amherst.edu/museums/naturalhistory/dinosaur-tracks
Research Projects
Footprint formation and interpreting fossil dinosaur tracks.
We seek to understand the origin and functional significance of Mesozoic track diversity by exploring disparate specimens in the historic Hitchcock Ichnology Collection at the Beneski Museum of Natural History at Amherst College.
Click here to read more…
X-rays, 3D information and human locomotion.
We use biplanar X-ray, 3D animation and computer simulation methods to understand the complex interactions between foot and substrate through which footprints are created. These innovative methods provide a novel toolkit for using a rapidly expanding record of hominin footprints to evaluate prominent, long-standing hypotheses of the evolution of human bipedalism
Research Centre for Evolutionary Anthropology and Palaeoecology 