purplecat

B. may (or may not) feature in a new two-part BBC series, Secrets of the Jurassic Dinosaurs. The first episode will be on BBC 2 (and iPlayer) on Sunday at 8pm: details here.

I believe, when filming, he had both forgotten his shaver and fallen over and cut open his head so he may not look quite his normal self if he has made it into the programme and not merely ended up on the cutting room floor.

The work reported here was done by a former PhD student of B's, but you'll notice B. gets to comment anyway. He was filmed by the BBC on Monday (to be broadcast we don't know when but presumably one of today's news programs) and interviewed by 5 Live last night (ditto). He's just emailed to say he's also going to be filmed by Newsround later today, presumably for their program this afternoon.

He seems to have got on someone's list as a useful dinosaur pundit...

B. spent quite a bit of time last year filming a TV series with Phil Manning. It's Phil's series but B. is playing sidekick in, we think, a couple of episodes (one on dinosaur locomotion and one on size). I gather it was pitched as "Top Gear meets Dinosaurs" and is an attempt to break away from the talking heads style of a lot of recent documentaries. It's going to be showing on National Geographic Wild channel, starting on Tuesday (3rd Feb) at 8pm. We don't get National Geographic Channel but I thought I'd flag the fact up for anyone out there who does. No idea whether B. will appear in the first episode or not.

This is a publicity page for the series

Article in the Daily Mail (oh! the embarrassment)

As far as I can work out, one of B's postdoc's took a video of a walking Gorilla as part of a project on modelling locomotion. B. then showed it to some people making a documentary on Bigfoot who asked if they could use it. B said they needed to ask the zoo for permission first (the original permission for filming was for scientific use only). The zoo asked if they could use it too and put it on their YouTube feed where it suddenly became surprisingly popular and attracted the attention of such prestigious publications (*ahem*) as the Daily Mail.

B. is happy anyway, Daily Mail notwithstanding.

Achilles tendon is key to evolution of human running

B. didn't even know this was going to appear. He'd actually assumed they had decided not to run the story, given the sudden cessation of all communication, but presumably they just stopped talking to him once they decided they had enough to write something.

A University of Manchester Press Release in which B. demonstrates that Hadrosaurs moved fastest by hopping like a kangaroo, but would probably have injured themselves doing so. He would be the first to point out that the results come with a lot of caveats, small sample size being one.

This is unlikely to be as big as T. Rex chasing down and eating David Beckham story, but he's been contacted by both the Manchester Evening News and the Telegraph.

Newsnight tonight, apparently. Something to do with a fossil - she says vaguely.

EDIT: or not, as it transpires. Though I think they are still running the item - only with an American.

B and I were surprised last night to see him in a trailer.

The Dinosaur Mummy will, apparently, be shown (reworked with a British Voice over) on Channel 4 at 9pm on Monday.

Once a year the Platform Grant on which I am a co-investigator has an Advisory Panel Meeting in which we invite three of the great and the good to come and comment on our work for the year. This one was arranged at rather short notice and so I engaged in a rather rushed visit to Edinburgh today.

Everyone much excited about T-Becks. AB, my PhD supervisor, congratulated B. on his Today program appearance, in particular his failure to make outrageous claims and his ability to get his point across concisely.

It's always nice to get back to Edinburgh, much as I enjoy working at Liverpool, Edinburgh is deeply familiar; a group of people working on the same sort of problems I've been working on for the past 15 years so we understand each other easily without the need for justifications and explanations. Hopefully I'll get back to do a week's work sometime in the Autumn. I discussed a couple of specific ideas with people who were quite keen that I should turn up and we should tackle some of these. The meeting went pretty well, the advisory panel had very little comment (unlike last year when they had some concerns about the overall strategic direction of the group) although they remain concerned about the group's involvement with ITI Techmedia a "pseudo-venture capital" organisation run by Scottish Enterprise. Their concern mostly centres around the inevitable Intellectual Property tension between academics (who want to publish) and business (who want to keep secrets). There were already a few comedy moments caused by the collaboration - a demo that could be watched but not photographed (mobile phones forbidden) and talks which disolved into "we'd love to tell you more but we can't".

A good day, albeit one that could have occurred at a more convenient time.

You may recall that the plan was that we would both take this week off and lay the kitchen floor. I have just spent most of today, alone, trying increasingly desperate measures to remove the last vestiges of vinyl tiles from the kitchen floor - paint stripper appears to be doing the trick.

If you are interested in finding out why Louise will not have a kitchen floor by Summerfest then you may consult the following places:

• BBC Worldwide and Radio 5 Live: Running the story from midnight apparently.


• The Today Programme (approx 6.50am): B. is quite worried about this one, in addition to an entirely understandable fear of John Humphries, he's been told that the Dean listens to the Today Programme.


• Probably any BBC Television News apart from the 10 O'Clock (i.e., Breakfast News, 1pm or 6pm)


• The Times, The Telegraph, The Guardian and The Independent

That's not counting miscellaneous local radio shows. The New Scientist, "somewhere in Germany" and "some paper in Sydney Australia" are also "thinking about it".

The story itself is under media embargo until midnight (which makes it sound terribly exciting) but I'm probably not giving too much away if I hint that its to do with dinosaurs.