Gareth Dyke

Gareth John Dyke is a palaeontologist whose work is concerned with the evolutionary history of birds and their dinosaurian relatives. His specific research interests include the phylogenetics of birds, the functional morphology of aves and non-avian dinosaurs, and the palaeoenvironments of fossil vertebrates.

Dyke received a BSc in Geology & Biology (First) from the University of Bristol in 1997, and a PhD in Palaeontology from the same institution in 2000.

From 2000 to 2002, he was a Chapman Postdoctoral Fellow in Ornithology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

From 2002 to 2011, Dyke was at the School of Biology and Environmental Science at University College Dublin, where he was given the title of Senior Lecturer in 2007.

Formerly a Senior Lecturer in Vertebrate Palaeontology at the University of Southampton, he is currently a researcher within the Department of Evolutionary Zoology and Human Biology at the University of Debrecen, Hungary. He additionally holds the title of Research Associate at both the American Museum of Natural History and the National Museum of Ireland.

His main work concern research on dinosaurs, but also a great deal of paleornithology, and even pterosaurs. He is also a strong proponent to the view of a dinosaurian origin of birds.

Dyke's research is concerned with “the evolutionary history of birds and their dinosaurian relatives and encompasses anatomy, phylogenetics, functional morphology, palaeoecology, taphonomy, sedimentology and aerodynamics as well as the analysis and interpretation of large fossil-record datasets.” That research is “grounded in the fossil record,” but “draws extensively on living animals.” He has described himself as “emphasising and building three over-arching themes,” namely:

He has published in Scientific American, Science, Nature, as well as in leading journals in both Biology and Earth Sciences. He describes his work as being located on “the interface between these two fields.”

In 1999, Dyke and a colleague reported that while the “traditional view, based largely on the fossil record,” was that most modern birds “did not appear until the Tertiary, after the end-Cretaceous extinction event,” new molecular divergence data “suggested that most, or all, of the major clades were present in the Cretaceous2,3.”

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