PALAEONTOLOGY[online]

Tag: Charlotte M. Bird

Charlotte Bird is a British palaeontologist at the University of Birmingham, having completed her MSci (Hons) in Geology and Physical Geography. She will be commencing a NERC CENTA Studentship at the university in 2019. The focus of her PhD will be brain evolution in pre-mammalian cynodonts, with a particular interest in determining the roles of intraspecific and ontogenetic variation during the evolution of the mammalian lineage. Alongside her research, Charlotte hopes to improve digitisation and analysis techniques for better research outcomes and to help with communicating her research to the public. Charlotte is also a GeoTeam volunteer for the aspiring UNESCO Black Country Global Geopark and assistant curator of the Virtual Natural History Museum.

She can be found at @CharlotteMBird on Twitter.

by Charlotte M. Bird 1 Introduction: Imagine you are an avid fossil hunter and have just dug up a skull of an extinct vertebrate. You are the first human ever to see it. Not only is that amazing, but you are also at the start of a journey into discovering how this organism lived: whether it was diurnal (active during the day) or nocturnal, whether it hunted above ground or burrowed, had poor vision or an exceptional sense of smell. Despite the millions of years that may have passed, the growing field of virtual palaeontology provides a new world of analysis techniques that can help palaeontologists to peer inside the skull and uncover some truly fascinating insights. What are digital endocasts? Virtual Palaeontology is the non-destructive study of fossils using digital method...