Digital Fossils: Using X-ray to Uncover Secrets of the Past

Wednesday, 11 June 2025

18:00 - 19:30

Free event. Booking required - please book your tickets here.

About the event

Thanks to Jurassic Park, Walking with Dinosaurs and other computer-generated imagery, we are familiar with dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals brought to life on our television and movie screens. But how do scientists know how dinosaurs moved, fed, the sounds they made and their colouration? In this talk Professor Emily Rayfield, Professor of Palaeobiology at the University of Bristol, will discuss how far palaeontologists can make statements about the behaviour of extinct animals, drawing together evidence from fossils, living animals and using X-rays and methods co-opted from engineers.

About the speaker

Professor Emily Rayfield is a Professor of Palaeobiology at the University of Bristol where her research focuses on the function of living and extinct animals. More particularly she uses biomechanical analysis, including the engineering technique finite element analysis (FEA), to deduce how skeletons function. Professor Rayfield studied Biological Sciences at the University of Oxford, before completing a PhD at the University of Cambridge. After a fellowships at Oxford, Cambridge and Natural History Museum in London, she then took up a permanent position at the University of Bristol. Professor Rayfield’s research pioneers new, cross-disciplinary engineering-informed computational Palaeobiology and was awarded the Royal Society’s Gabor medal in 2024 for this highly interdisciplinary research.