As part of my PhD project, I joined forces with two number crunchers to assess how rates of evolution changed across the dinosaur-bird transition. Graeme Lloyd and Steve Wang are paleontologists, but I don’t know if either of them has ever collected a fossil. They are first-rate statisticians—math whizzes who take joy in sitting in front of their computers for hours, writing code and running analyses. The three of us worked together to devise a new way of calculating how fast or slow animals change features of their skeletons over time and how these rates change branch by branch on the family
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