The study of dinosaurs has been through a revolution in recent decades. The story began half a century ago, when Robert McNeill Alexander, a professor of zoology at the University of Leeds, showed how the speed of an animal could be calculated from the spacing of its footprints and its body size.

This formula worked both for modern and extinct animals and so, for the first time, the speed of a dinosaur could be estimated from a fossilised trackway. Alexander calculated speeds for different dinosaurs of between 1.0 and 3.6 metres per second (up to 13kmh) – rather slower than others had guessed.

In the 1970s, dinosaurs were becoming exciting again after years of being treated as lumbering failures. Termed the “dinosaur renaissance”, American paleontologists Robert Bakker and John Ostrom were among those transforming understanding by arguing that dinosaurs were active, possibly warm-blooded, and that they included the ancestors of birds. Remarkable fossils of feathered dinosaurs from China, found from 1996 onwards, cemented this idea.

Before Alexander’s groundbreaking study in 1976, palaeontologists had made “reasonable guesses” about the function of dinosaurs – persuasive arguments but often untestable. Alexander began a movement to apply scientific methods to investigating dinosaur function and behaviour.

His research heralded the start of a revolution in palaeobiological methods, using........

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