Dr Matt Dempsey

Matt Dempsey’s profile Matt uses Letterboxd to share film reviews and lists. 59 films watched. Favorites: Jurassic Park (1993), The Empire Strikes Back (1980), The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), The Batman (2022). Bio: ...

letterboxd.com/sketchyrapto...

Today's cinema trips!

I might raise the Avatar 2 rating to 5 just because of how blown away I was by the artistry of it all.

It was actually my first viewing, I missed the original release, and figured that TV would be an inherently lesser experience, so I decided to wait.

Watching Snowpiercer, spotted John Sibbick's Archaeopteryx.

PA12, via multijet fusion!

It's a really good detail-durability balance.

A dumb analogy - you wouldn't look at a freshly ironed shirt and conclude that fabric doesn't crease.

You also cannot rule out that decomposition processes unrelated to planar compression have also changed what you're looking at.

These fossils are still very informative, but you wouldn't reconstruct an animal's *exact* life appearance and functional morphology based on roadkill.

You just can't rule out that said compression has considerably warped the soft tissue outline in these cases.

And even if you could, in many cases you're still not dealing with clean projection of the body shape onto a perfect, standardised anatomical plane.

I think the allure of soft tissue has made people too comfortable with taking slab fossils at face value. It's not like they aren't useful at all for inferring life appearance, but you have to consider that these are non-rigid 3D objects that have been compressed into a 2D plane.

I really ought to go back and remaster the cover image I made for the first chapter so that it's more consistent with the others...

These three chapters were the ones thay we always planned to publish more or less in the same form that they took in the thesis itself, so having these out in the world is a bit of a personal milestone.

As of this week, three out of the four research chapters from my PhD have been published. Data from the fourth is currently being adapted for an in-progress paper.

royalsocietypublishing.org/.../10.../rs...
royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Yes. A bent-limb stance causes the bones to be loaded in different ways to an upright stance. To deal with this, the limb bones of sprawling or crouched animals have different dimensions that wouldn't be directly comparable to animals with upright stances, even if their centres of mass were similar.

The Alligator and Cheetah skeletons in this banner image were modified from CT scans originally publshed by Macaulay et al. (2023) and Coatham et al. (2021), respectively - each of these were major data sources for this particular study.

Forgot to announce I have a new paper out this week! Animals that are more front-heavy have thicker, differently shaped forelimb bones to deal with the extra load. Limb bones alone may thus be useful proxies for body shape - but posture complicates things. royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Style test for a tutorial series I'm putting together.

Will probably redraw the life head shot, as I kinda rushed it.

A lighting turnaround of the new-look Spicomellus I made for the PR materials. Was really cool to see this clip + the turntable on BBC news last night.

I'm really happy with the copper patina vibe I settled on for the colours. This was my first time working in Substance Painter!

Introducing a crazy new look for Spicomellus, based on new osteoderms unlike anything we've ever seen before. I was brought in to produce a life reconstruction based on the new material, published today in Nature by Maidment et al:

Hi all, me, @richardjbutler.bsky.social and the amazing UK-US-Moroccan team are delighted to announce that.. we have a new specimen of Spicomellus AND IT'S WAY WEIRDER AND WAY COOLER THAN WE EVER IMAGINED!!

Matt Dempsey’s profile Matt uses Letterboxd to share film reviews and lists. 28 films watched. Favorites: Jurassic Park (1993), The Empire Strikes Back (1980), The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), The Batman (2022). Bio: ...

Hey, follow me on Letterboxd: boxd.it/fvCuL

I've been on a bit of a genre binge these last few days.

Insane movies to watch back to back

Watching tonight - not the most conventional double feature ever, but I don't get into the city as often as I'd like, and I'm not missing an IMAX rerelease of one of my all time faves.

All set up for @dinoconuk.bsky.social! Come by table 4 tomorrow... I have dinosaurs if you have coin.

All set up for @dinoconuk.bsky.social! Come by table 4 tomorrow... I have dinosaurs if you have coin.